


out of orbit

by rbillustration



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Keith (Voltron), Alien!Keith, Angst, Galra Keith (Voltron), Gen, Possessed Shiro, So much angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-15
Updated: 2017-05-14
Packaged: 2018-07-24 02:16:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 19
Words: 78,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7489449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rbillustration/pseuds/rbillustration
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dragged apart by Haggar's attack on the wormhole, the paladins and Alteans struggle to survive and find one another again. Luck has placed them all within the same galaxy... but their fortune ends there. Lance is stranded with a badly-injured Shiro and his relief at finding their leader still accompanying him soon turns to terror. Keith may be the only who can rectify the situation - but the Galra have him in their grasp, and they don't want to kill him. They want him as one of their own.</p>
<p>COMPLETE</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Descent

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first time in many years writing fanfiction and my first ever attempt at Voltron fic. Please feel free to let me know if you see any typos/discrepancies etc.! I'd really enjoy hearing your opinions.

Beyond the glass, the sky was on fire.

A blur of formless colours raced by the Red Lion's cockpit while all sound was obscured by the thrusters' deafening roar. Keith resisted the urge to immediately close his eyes again in pure terror, hands closed so tightly around the controls that his knuckles were white. He needed to regain control, to slow the beast's descent - but how? He didn't have the experience - to pilot the lion, to understand the intricacies that were involved in her control.

To run into battles he wasn't prepared for.

He gritted his teeth in frustration, a helpless anger tightening his throat. He had been so stupid, throwing all other concerns aside in his quest to pursue Zarkon and destroy him for everything he had done. For ripping Pidge's family away, for causing Shiro such irreparable physical and mental harm, for being the reason Keith and his fellow paladins had been torn from their original, ordinary lives and dropped on a planet millions of light years away, to fight a battle they weren't ready for.

Not that his life had been all that ordinary any more, not since the disaster of the Kerberos mission.

He flinched back as a vibrant bloom of flame enveloped the Red Lion's head; they had burst through the atmosphere and were descending at rapid speed. Which planet they were headed towards, he had no idea, and he could do nothing at this point but hope.

The moment they had entered the wormhole after racing away from Zarkon's control ship, he had known something was wrong. The ferocious crackling of the lightning that had followed them through the portal had been deafening on all sides, drowning out Coran's panicked cry. He didn't need to tell them that the wormhole had been compromised, that the lions had been separated from the Altean castle-ship and they were spiralling out of control. Keith had a feeling that unanimously, they had all immediately understood everything had gone horribly wrong.

His lion was partially damaged from Zarkon's attacks, but the alarm was no longer blaring, and the warning messages had reduced themselves to a flashing exclamation mark on the screen before him. He had to ignore it, for now. He had no knowledge of how to repair the lion - would it repair itself? - and in the meantime his top priority was to ensure his own survival. Beyond that, everything was out of his control, and the thought caused a cold splinter of fear to dig its way into his core. He had worked alone for so long, in his ferocious self-driven determination to solve the mystery of Kerberos. But that had been back at home, in a shack in the desert, peering at maps and satellite tracking and online records. Not hurtling through the atmosphere of an unknown planet with no idea what lay before him.

He straightened in his seat, gripping the controls tightly as his gaze swept the landscape below. Dark clouds broken by the flickering glow of violent storms zig-zagged across an ocean the colour of slate. A small landmass sat further to the north - if it was the north. He was at the point where he could barely tell which way was up any more. The ground looked stony and barren; whether it was habitable was up for debate. He might not even be able to breathe within this atmosphere, and worrying about the friendliness of this mystery planet's inhabitants was a whole other story.

Realising that he was headed directly for the planet's vast ocean, Keith pulled rapidly at the controls and with a roar the lion tilted backwards, the engines reaching a painful pitch. He cast a quick glance towards the multitude of screens on what he had come to describe as the dashboard, but the compass and other locational data were spinning wildly out of control. He'd have to rely solely on his instincts - something he was used to, but never like this.

Even when fighting Zarkon, he had known the other paladins were behind him - busy with their own struggles, but _there_. Not on another planet, in another galaxy, another universe. His hands shook on the controls. He wouldn't even be here if Shiro hadn't swept in and wrenched the Red Lion to safety while Zarkon had been preparing a final strike - and likewise, Shiro would never have been pulled from the depths of the Galra ship without the efforts of Allura and Hunk. Without even realising how closely they had all been drawn together, the paladins and their Altean companions had become inseparable. They were reliant upon each other, and now, torn apart so violently, they were vulnerable. Exactly as Haggar had wanted.

The naked fear of what could have happened to his companions, where they could have ended up, was overwhelming. It took all the self-control he had not to simply let go of the lion's controls, curl into a ball and cry. The possible situations the Alteans and the other paladins had ended up in were, quite literally, limitless. They might already be dead. He could fight tooth and nail to return to Arus, only to find it abandoned with only rolling hills and an empty sky to greet him. No castle, no Allura or Coran. No wide grin from Hunk or eager hugs from Pidge. No theatrical display of false rivalry from Lance or a relieved half-smile from Shiro. Damn, he even missed the space mice. How pathetic was that?

"Calm down. Calm down," he muttered to himself, taking several deep breaths while his gaze remained locked on the rocky island far below. One thing at a time. Trying to think of everything, to comprehend the fact that the people he had become closest to may no longer be alive, was more than he could take. He had a family, he realised with a jolt. The thought was so alien to him that it had barely crossed his mind - he hadn't allowed himself to consider it. But no. That tiny, timid, hopeful part of his heart was right. He had a family. And he might have lost them all over again.

The Red Lion let out a rumbling growl, and he allowed the sound to wash over him. A noise that may have been downright frightening to others had the opposite effect on Keith; slowly, steadily, he began to relax. He wasn't alone. He had his lion. They would be OK.

"Let's do this," he said quietly, and pushed the controls forward. The lion roared, the sound mirrored by its powerful thrusters, and they raced in a wide curve toward the island below.

Keith's gaze darted across the landscape as they came in closer, his hand hovering above the control panel. It was always difficult to walk that thin line between being wary and becoming downright jumpy when descending into a potentially hostile environment. He didn't know how Shiro did it, least of all with the trauma he'd been put through at the hands of the Galra. Keith was surprised he didn't instinctively shoot anyone who got within a ten-metre radius.

As the darkened clouds parted, a structure came into view below, and Keith drew in a sharp breath. A chaotic tangle of curves and sharp edges, forged in metallic black like a slick of oil shaped into solid form... This was a Galra settlement. There was no doubt about it. He looked to the north, and saw vibrant violet light spilling from windows high up in a control tower, the spiked symbol at its very top. The same blinding glow that had permeated the walls of the enormous control ship the paladins had only just escaped from, the same harsh light that had enveloped the Balmera and burned across the surface of Shiro's mechanical arm. Of all the places he could have ended up. Keith didn't know if he wanted to scream and throw things, or roll up and cry. Again.

"Land. Find safety. Find a way out of here." He repeated the list to himself several times, partly to commit it to memory but mostly because focusing on the repetition kept his thoughts from spiralling off into imaginary situations that were beyond his control. He wrenched on the controls and the lion turned in a broad arc, away from the Galra settlement and into the wilderness. In the back of his mind was a lingering concern that this planet's inhabitants had already spotted him. Hadn't Zarkon detected the presence of the paladins when they approached his command ship? Either way, it was too late to worry about it. He couldn't have worked out what kind of place he had ended up in without landing.

Keith flew low, several miles from the structure which stood out like an inky blot on the rocky landscape. When he finally deemed it to be relatively safe, he brought the lion in behind a cluster of jagged boulders. The ground shook as they touched down, the beast's claws immediately digging into the earth. Keith was suddenly extremely glad he had ended up piloting the Red Lion. This would have been made a whole lot more difficult if he had had to find a suitable hiding place for the broad bulk of the Yellow Lion or, even worse, the Black Lion's enormous frame. He wondered if Hunk and Shiro were doing exactly that right now, desperately trying to reach safety from life-threatening situations - then he firmly put a lid on those thoughts and pushed them to the back of his mind. Not now. He needed to ensure he remained alive first. He would be no use to anyone if he died here.

"So, what do we do now?" he asked his lion, sinking back into his seat as he studied the stony landscape before him. Apart from the Galra settlement, there was very little of interest in sight. He had been hoping another structure might make an appearance as he came in closer to land, a settlement that was distinctly non-Galra and perfectly harmless. A place where the inhabitants didn't want him dead, and might even be able to give him instructions to return to Arus. No, that wasn't going to happen. And neither was an answer from his lion. He gave a humourless smile and shook his head. The robotic beast could only assist him in combat, which was far better than nothing, but it wouldn't help him in his quest to find out where on earth - or rather, where in the universe - he had ended up.

With the navigational controls out, he was stuck in limbo - he couldn't start to figure out where he was going until he discovered where he was in the first place. He'd give his right arm for one of those handy holographic maps the Castle of Lions possessed in its control chamber. Immediately he grimaced. Perhaps best not to use that turn of phrase in front of Shiro.

With the lion unable to assist him in the most urgent task, he needed to search outside - and he wasn't looking forward to it. Keith looked toward the tightly-grouped tangle of Galra buildings and exhaled slowly. If only he possessed Allura's chameleon-like ability to change her appearance to suit her environment. If she hadn't given herself up to force Shiro to safety, their plan would have worked perfectly. In terms of her disguise, they had managed to sneak in without a hiccup. Not to mention that Allura was a fantastic leader. So too was Shiro, and Pidge was smart enough to figure her way out of any situation. Hunk was steadily learning to cope with high-pressure situations, Coran had enough knowledge under that goofy facade to work out a route to safety from most eventualities, and Lance... well. It was difficult to know if Lance knew what he was doing most of the time, let alone anyone else. Perhaps he wouldn't be much use here, but simply to have some company would be worth putting up with his nonsensical babbling about the latest 'hot alien babe' he'd encountered. Maybe.

Sitting around here wishing the rest of the paladins would magically appear to assist him wasn't helping anyone. With another sigh Keith lowered the lion so her head was resting on the rough ground and opened up the mouth. The metallic shapes of the cockpit drew back to allow in a broad view of the heavy clouds above and the sharp acidic tang of the landscape beyond. The only sound was the rush of air from the vents and whirr of hydraulics; the place itself was uncomfortably silent.

Keith stepped out of his seat and with one last glance back within the lion, headed outside and onto the hard earth. He paused for a moment, ready to leap back inside in an instant at the realisation that he couldn't breathe on this planet and was about to collapse. But no - everything seemed to be fine. His red-and-white uniform stuck out like a sore thumb amongst the dull browns and purples of the surrounding area, immediately marking him out as a Voltron paladin, but it couldn't be helped. He wasn't about to take it off and leave himself vulnerable to attack. Whether or not he looked like a paladin was irrelevant when a Galra was close enough to cave his head in.

For now, his only option was to approach the settlement ahead and find some way to work out where he was. He just needed the bare-bones information to understand vaguely what part of the universe he had ended up in, before heading back to his lion and striking out in (hopefully) the right direction to find the castle, or Arus, or perhaps even Earth. He knew now that he could never return to his home planet without knowing what had happened to his companions, but the urge to just see those familiar grassy landscapes and mountains and a moon he actually recognised was, for a moment, so overwhelming it almost took his breath away. He pushed the feeling back down, like he had everything else, and activated the Red Lion's particle barrier before he started to walk toward the dark shape on the horizon.

"Halt!"

Keith froze.

"Put your hands up and turn around."

Every curse word he knew ran through his head in quick succession. How had he not heard a thing? He had been so wrapped up in his own frightened thoughts - and to think he believed he had his emotions all neatly compartmentalised. What a joke.

Either way, the Galra had another think coming if they believed he was about to lie down and let them take him without a fight. Keith reached down to grip the hilt of his bayard and swung round to strike, the weapon blazing into life with a crackle of electricity. The Galra leapt back in surprise before Keith's swing reached him, then he stopped, and stared. Keith stopped too, momentarily stunned, the sword humming eagerly beside him. He had expected to have his head cleaved off in an instant. Why had the alien not attacked him?

There was a pause, then the Galra burst out laughing. The sound echoed from the metallic shapes of the Red Lion, from the wall of jagged grey rocks to their right. Keith stepped back, drawing the blade back into a 'ready' position. He was damned if he was going to let this smug creature made a mockery of him.

"That's a good one." The Galra bent over, slapping his knee in great mirth. "You've earned yourself a drink, my friend."

Keith felt one of his eyebrows slowly rise toward his hairline. Had this guy completely lost his mind? Whatever. He didn't care. He would cut him down - put all those hours of training to good use - and head to the settlement to find his way out of this damn place.

"Honestly thought you were a paladin," the alien wheezed, finally managing to straighten up again. "You almost gave me a heart attack zooming down in that red thing. I guess Haggar's plan worked. Would have been nice if you'd got the paladin as well, could have got some nice information from him, but hey - I suppose it's not a huge deal if you threw him out in the middle of the wormhole. Wonder where he ended up!" This last thought was apparently a source of great amusement and he doubled over again.

Keith continued to stand in utter bemusement, then slowly, a plan began to form in the back of his mind. For whatever reason, this creature believed they were one and the same. Perhaps, considering he had offered him a drink, he had already had a little too much himself. Did the Galra drink alcohol? Did they possess any sort of intoxicating substances? He had no idea. Maybe his eyesight wasn't very good, or there was something in the atmosphere of the planet that had addled his mind. But then, why would the Galra be here at all? None of it made sense - but if this alien, for whatever reason, genuinely believed Keith was one of his own kind, he would take advantage of it.

"Yes. I did throw the paladin out," he managed to force out, then realised he sounded about as enthusiastic as if he was reading out train times. Acting had never been his strong point - in fact, neither was displaying any emotions at all, even if they were genuine. He attempted a grin; it felt ridiculous. "Wish you'd been there to see it! Made for a good laugh."

"I bet it did." The man finally recovered himself and straightened up, casting a glance toward the Red Lion sitting still and silent above them. "We better get this thing inside. How come you didn't fly it straight into the hangar?"

"Well, if I'd just come zooming in without warning you'd have shot it out of the sky," Keith replied, then dared to add in what he hoped was a derisive tone, "Are you stupid?"

"Oh. Yes. Good point. I mean, no, I'm not stupid." The Galra nodded furiously, and Keith was immediately glad he had encountered what appeared to be a low-ranking soldier. Perhaps the alien thought Keith was of a much higher station. Well, he could probably take advantage of that.

"I'm not familiar with this... control post." He waved a hand vaguely in the direction of the structure in the distance. He hoped that was the right term, but he wasn't corrected, so he assumed it was. "I need you to give me coordinates to search out the Castle of Lions."

"Immediately?" It was difficult to tell with that dark helmet across half his face, but the Galra soldier looked confused. "Aren't you going to speak with the commanding officer here first?"

"I don't need to. I'm here on Emperor Zarkon's direct orders." Referring to that monster by his title made him want to grit his teeth, but he resisted the urge. "I need to pursue the castle immediately. I'm going to infiltrate their midst - that's why I'm disguised. Whatever you think, I wasn't trying to play some sort of stupid practical joke."

"Of course not, sir." The alien attempted to look abashed.

"Of course, since I was in the wormhole as well, I also got thrown out to an unspecified location, and it happened to be here," Keith continued, relieved to see that the other man appeared convinced. "I just need you to give me the correct coordinates, then I can go after the castle and capture the rest of the lions. Then Voltron will be ours."

"Yes!" the soldier exclaimed excitedly, making Keith jump. "Finally! I'll take you there right now." He began to walk toward the distant structure, casting eager glances back toward the Red Lion as he went. "This is so exciting. You'll probably get a promotion for this. I wonder if I'll get a promotion for helping you...?"

Keith tuned out as the alien descended into nonsensical mumbling, following close at his heels across the rough ground. Whatever crazy reason the soldier had for believing Keith was Galra, he hoped his luck continued - because once he was inside the inky-black walls of that compound, there would be no fellow paladins to run in and save him.


	2. Forest

Pain was the first sensation that greeted Lance's senses, followed on its heels by a peculiar warmth. It wasn't altogether unpleasant... In fact, it was rather nice. If his back wasn't causing him to feel as if he had been thrown bodily into the ground from a great height, he might be tempted to just lie here and relax. But there was a niggling concern in the back of his mind. He tried to ignore, but it persisted.

  
Reluctantly, he opened one eye, wincing as blinding sunlight burned into it. With a groan, he rolled onto his front, wincing all the way, and opened the other eye to blink at the emerald grass beneath him. Green grass... tree roots... sunlight... His breath caught in his throat. Earth?

  
Lance leapt upright, then immediately regretted it when pain shot up his spine. Nothing seemed to be broken, which was lucky, because if it was he would probably have just made it ten times worse. He wobbled for a few seconds, momentarily dizzy, and grabbed onto a nearby tree for balance. The bark felt real enough beneath his hands. Surely, after all this time, he hadn't had the luck to end up back where he had started, the place that had been on his mind for weeks - not that he'd mentioned his homesickness to his fellow paladins. They'd never let him hear the end of it.

  
How had he ended up here? He tried to sort through the muddle of memories from the last few days, frowning, then his eyes widened. Zarkon's stronghold... a frantic race against time to flee through the wormhole before Haggar's vicious attack hit them... Coran screaming that the wormhole had been compromised. That they had no idea where they might end up, whether they would ever see one another again.

  
Lance's fingers tightened on the tree bark. His fellow paladins might not even be alive. How would he know? He had no idea how to communicate with them, to even begin searching.

  
And where was his lion?

  
He gasped and pushed away from the tree, stumbling through knee-high bushes and overhanging vines. Bird calls split the air and the undergrowth was full of the chatter and rustling of small creatures. He tried to pinpoint them, to identify the sounds, but they weren't familiar to him. He was simply in a part of the world he had never travelled to before, that was it. He determinedly pushed back any other thoughts that intruded on his conviction that he was back on Earth. He wouldn't allow himself to think otherwise.

  
The glint of sunlight on metal greeted his eyes through a gap in the trees ahead. Lance withdrew a sharp breath and sped up his pace, gritting his teeth against the pain of numerous cuts and bruises that had made themselves known as he walked. Even if he had no plan for figuring out what to do next, if he had his lion, he wasn't completely lost. He wasn't stranded.

  
He forced his way through a tangle of knotted vines and rushed forward to press his hands against the lion's metal flank in sheer relief. Its surface was cool against his fingertips, and he leant forward to rest his forehead on it, letting out a long sigh. It was only when he drew back to look up at the beast's head that he froze.

  
This was not Blue. The angular surfaces that made up its enormous form were a combination of silver and gleaming onyx.

  
"Black!" The presence of the Black Lion could only mean one thing. He wasn't alone. _"Shiro!"_

  
He sprinted away from the creature's side and towards the head, heart pounding with a heady and bizarre combination of relief and terror. He may not be the only one to have crash-landed on this planet... but he might be the only one to have survived it.

  
No. Shiro was tougher than any of them - except perhaps Allura. That girl could do more than pull her weight in the team. Sometimes she ended up being the one dragging the rest of them with her - quite literally, if what Shiro had said was true when he reluctantly admitted that Allura had picked him up and bodily thrown him into that escape pod.

  
The Black Lion was lying on its front with its head resting on the ground. Breathing heavily, Lance hurried around its side and pushed through the branches of several fallen trees that the beast must have knocked down when it landed. He jumped over a log, rushed to face the creature, and stared.

  
The mouth was open, and the cockpit was empty.

  
"No." Lance's heart sank, and he looked desperately around him, only the sight of lush greenery and twisted undergrowth meeting his eyes. Perhaps Shiro had never ended up here at all. Maybe there had been some horrific accident and the lion's cockpit had opened while they were still in the wormhole, and he had been hurled out into space-

  
Lance's foot hit something that moved. He let out a squeal and jumped back, ready to scramble up the nearest tree if necessary, then stopped. The something was white, amid a sea of green and brown. He gasped, and rushed forward to pull aside the tangle of fallen branches before him. They were heavier than he had anticipated, and with the sun beating mercilessly down he soon found himself sweltering in his paladin uniform; he pulled off his helmet, and immediately resumed his work. He couldn't stop. He _wouldn't_ stop.

  
The last branch rolled aside and he was greeted by the sight of his fellow paladin lying crumpled amongst the undergrowth. Lance dropped to his knees and reached out, then stopped. However strong the urge to just shake the other man awake, he might have injuries Lance couldn't see. Who knew what kind of force he had struck the ground with? Lance wasn't sure himself how much he had hit on the way down.

  
Gripped with uncertainty for a moment, he hesitantly reached down and patted his companion's cheek. For all that Shiro had moved earlier, perhaps it had simply been an instinctive reaction to being stepped on.

  
Or maybe he had imagined it. Maybe, from somewhere in his mind, riddled with fear and exhausted from injuries his battered body had received, he had simply _thought_ Shiro moved, when it was already too late.

  
"No. No way. Definitely not." He shook the thoughts away and tapped the other man's cheek again. When there was no response, he patted a little harder, then finally after several minutes his panic overwhelmed him and he slapped Shiro across the face.

  
Shiro let out a yell, leapt upright in a flurry of movement and immediately lifted an arm to punch the other man. With a shriek Lance leapt backwards and at the last second his fellow paladin stopped, his fist glowing purple and hovering a few inches from Lance's cheek. They stared at one another for a moment, before Shiro finally lowered his hand, breathing heavily.

"Oh. It's you."

  
"'Oh'? Don't you 'oh' me!" Lance spluttered, scrambling upright from the sprawled position he had landed in. He had seen the genuine, lingering terror in Shiro's eyes, the way all colour had drained from his face in an instant. No doubt, his mind had immediately been dragged back into places he never wanted to return. And yet, Lance couldn't stop the desperate, panicked words from rushing out of him. "You nearly smashed my head in!"

  
"You slapped me in the face!" Shiro protested, rubbing his reddened cheek.

  
"And killing me in return is just fine, right?" Lance demanded, gesturing wildly - at what, he wasn't sure. Adrenaline was surging through his veins to the point where he just wanted to scream - at Shiro, at the Galra, at Allura, at everything. It took him a moment to realise what he was saying, to try and claw the words back in before they pulled Shiro back to his darkest memories. He stammered for a moment, then burst out, "I... I didn't mean it like that. I didn't mean to..."

  
"I know," Shiro said solemnly.

  
"I didn't mean it. I just panicked. I was only trying to wake you up. I thought you were _dead!"_

  
Shiro simply looked at him from where he still sat amongst the crumpled undergrowth, and to his surprise and shame Lance realised tears were streaming down his cheeks. He swiped them away quickly with a shaking hand, then flinched when Shiro got to his feet and pulled him into a hug. The closest thing to a hug he had ever witnessed from Shiro was the moment he had put an arm around Pidge to comfort her in a moment of grief. This was extremely rare, but very welcome. He wrapped his arms around the other man for a moment, burying his face in his shoulder as he struggled to control his emotions. It was lucky that Shiro would probably never mention this to the other paladins - if they ever found them. He wouldn't live it down.

  
"I thought you were dead," he repeated weakly as he finally pulled away. "I didn't know what to do."

  
"It's OK. I'm fine. At least, I think so." Shiro looked down at himself to check for damage, and Lance followered his gaze. The other man's helmet was missing and blood stained the white streak that shot through his hair, hopefully only from a small cut. The right-hand side of the uniform's torso was heavily damaged - it appeared to have been burned away, and when Lance looked more closely at the skin underneath, he hissed in sympathy.

  
"That looks bad."

  
"It's alright."

  
Lance had the distinct feeling that it was far from 'alright', that Shiro was outright lying to assauge the younger man's fears. He was concerned, but too tired to argue. "You worried me for a second, man. I thought you'd had a nasty bang on the head - well, nastier than the one you've already got."

  
Shiro dabbed at the cut on his hairline with a fingertip and grimaced. "Sorry. I didn't mean to worry you."

  
"Why are you apologising for being thrown out of your lion?"

  
Shiro managed a wry, lopsided smile. "Fair point. Right. Let's see if we can figure out where we are and get out of here. Where's your lion?"

  
"Ah... that's a problem. I was searching for it when I found yours," Lance said, following as the other paladin strode through the long grass toward the Black Lion's cockpit. He paused, then dared to ask the question he wasn't sure he wanted an answer to. "When you say 'figure out where we are'... do you think we could be on Earth?"

  
"No. We're not on Earth." There was no hesitation in Shiro's voice, and Lance immediately felt his heart plummet into his feet. Shiro must have noticed the expression of dismay on his companion's face, because his voice was softer when he added, "It's similar, but no, it's not Earth."

 

"How do you know?" Lance pressed, standing aside as Shiro stepped into the lion's cockpit and began checking the control functions. He knew deep down that the other man was right, but there was a part of him that still insisted there could be a one-in-a-million chance that they had ended up exactly where they started.

  
"You think I haven't travelled? Gained enough knowledge to know from the immediate signs whether I'm on a friendly or hostile planet?" Shiro's voice was muffled as he checked a wire beneath the weapons panel. Lance was glad the other man wasn't looking his way, since his cheeks had turned a dark red. No, it wasn't his place to question their leader's judgement. After all, he was only a fighter cadet because Keith dropped out. Or rather, he had been, and now he was something else entirely. Somehow he didn't think the Garrison would accept giant robotic lions as acceptable space exploration vehicles.

  
"Sorry. I guess you do know a lot more than me."

  
"Don't be sorry. Just trust me." Shiro straightened up and brushed imaginary dust off his hands. "Right. Black seems to be perfectly operational. We must have hit something on the way down that caused the cockpit to open. Good job I only got thrown a few metres. I should probably mention it to Pidge so she can take a look and see if we need to add any more safety..." He trailed off as he turned to face Lance again, and the younger man saw his expression change, the leader's facade falling to reveal the uncertainty beneath. There was silence for a heartbeat.

  
"Do you think... the others are OK?"

  
Shiro couldn't answer that, and they both knew it.

  
"I don't know, Lance. But they're all smart, intuitive individuals. I think we just have to trust that wherever they've ended up, they can protect themselves. It's all we can do right now."

  
"Right." Lance nodded, trying to force some determination into his tone. He looked around, studying the densely-packed forest that surrounded their clearing. He suspected there hadn't been a clearing here before the enormous Black Lion had come hurtling out of the sky. "My lion can't be too far off either, or I wouldn't still be in one piece as well. Perhaps it's off in the other direction."

  
"Perhaps it is," Shiro agreed, then looked back to the spot where he had landed. "I'll look for my helmet while you search out your lion. I'm going to need that."

  
"Ah," Lance muttered. Shiro blinked at him.

  
"Is there a problem?"

  
"No... I was just thinking - if we go our separate ways, how am I going to find you again if you don't have your helmet?"

  
Shiro paused, then pointed at the beast towering above them. "The giant robotic lion might give you a clue to my location."

  
"Ah... yes... it might do." There was no way Lance could admit the true reason he didn't want to go strolling off into the forest again. There was some nonsensical, nagging fear in the back of his mind that if he let the other paladin and the Black Lion out of his sight for even a moment, they might completely disappear. That all of this was some bizarre figment of his imagination, and the real Lance was still floating somewhere out in space, unconscious-

  
"Are you OK, Lance?"

  
Shiro's concerned tone reminded him so much of his parents that Lance had to swallow back a sudden urge to cry again. This was getting ridiculous. Everything was so chaotic, so difficult to understand. He just wanted something familiar to hold onto, some semblance of his former life. He wiped a hand roughly across his eyes again, and said more aggressively than was necessary, "I'm fine."

  
"OK." Shiro didn't sound convinced, but he didn't press the matter. He pointed to a spot somewhere beyond Lance's right shoulder. "You should be able to see more clearly from that rise. Give me a shout when you find your lion. You'd think a giant blue robot would be easier to find, but..." He trailed off, shrugged, and began searching the undergrowth for his helmet.

  
"You're not giving me much hope in finding your lion again," Lance pointed out, starting to forge a route in the opposite direction.

  
"Mine's bigger than yours."

  
There was a pause, and Lance slowly turned back around, one eyebrow rising upward. A bark of laughter rang out from the undergrowth Shiro had disappeared into.

  
"Innuendo not intended."

  
"It was totally intended," Lance replied, resuming his search.

  
It took him around ten minutes to find the Blue Lion after clambering up the short slope Shiro had pointed out. The densely-packed tree trucks, connected together with a tangle of vines and the vast canopy above, made it difficult to see much at all without climbing. The lion had fallen around fifteen metres from Lance's location and was sprawled halfway up a ridge, having landed considerably less elegantly than its black counterpart. If was no wonder his back was aching after rolling down that slope. Pidge would definitely need to do some work on those safety settings. He faltered as he opened the cockpit, and then continued.

  
The faster he and Shiro got out of here, the faster they could find the others and ensure they were alright.  
He started up the lion, and it shuddered and sat up with a roar, steadying itself on huge metal feet. A flock of colourful birds lifted off from a nearby tree, shrieking in fright, and raced away out of sight. Lance grimaced. Good job they weren't planning on hanging around on this planet for too long, since they hadn't exactly made much effort to be discreet. He didn't even know if it was inhabited. He wondered vaguely if there were any attractive aliens to be found here.

  
A sudden harsh crackle of static interrupted his thought process and he let out a yell of alarm, almost letting go of the controls. It took him several seconds to realise the sound had come from his helmet.

  
"H-hello? Who's there?"

  
What was the protocol to responding to noises coming from your headgear's communication system when you barely knew how it worked? He had no idea, and when he received no response, he let go of the lion's controls and grabbed the sides of the helmet as if it might help.

  
"Hello? Can you hear me?"

  
"-nce? Lance, can you hear me? It's Allura."

  
His heart thudded so hard he felt it might leap out of his chest. It took him a moment to string together a sentence that might make sense. "Yeah, I can hear you! Where are you? What's happening? Is everyone safe?"

  
"Hold on, I can't answer everything at once!" Her voice was still riddled with feedback, but stronger than before. "We're on Arus. I've got Coran, Hunk and Pidge with me. We managed to group together before the wormhole spat us out. We ended up in the same galaxy as Arus so it didn't take too long to find our way back."  
Lance's hands were clenched so tightly on the steering controls that he had to make a conscious effort to loosen them before he broke something. "Is anyone hurt?"

  
"A few injuries, nothing major. The castle is secure."

  
Lance almost sank into his seat cushion with sheer relief. "That's great."

  
"I'm presuming Shiro and Keith are with you?" Allura asked.

  
Lance went cold. He sat back up again, slowly, and stared through the cockpit glass at the forest beyond. He had been so focused on the fact that the castle was safe that his mind had automatically jumped to the conclusion that everyone in it was as well. He hadn't absorbed the list of names. "No. Well, Shiro is. Not Keith."

  
There was silence from Allura.

  
"Do you know where Keith is?" Lance asked, his voice painfully quiet.

  
"No." She drew in a deep breath that sent a painful hiss of static to his ears. "I lost track of him in the wormhole."

  
The Blue Lion had reached the clearing its counterpart still lay in; it had only taken a few paces of its enormous form, but it had felt like years while Allura broke her news. Shiro was still searching amongst the trees, looking uncharacteristically annoyed; apparently his helmet was nowhere to be found. No wonder Allura hadn't been able to get through to him. Lance lowered the Blue Lion's head to the ground and leapt out, sprinting over to the other man.

  
"Shiro! Allura's contacted me! She's got Coran, Hunk and Pidge!"

  
Shiro straightened up, eyes widening, then his expression of relief was followed immediately on its heels by a frown. "And Keith?"

  
"We don't know." Lance's words were echoed with a murmur of agreement from Allura, who perhaps hadn't yet realised that Shiro hadn't heard her or simply wasn't thinking straight at the moment. Lance couldn't blame her; he couldn't recall the last time he had been able to think straight.

  
"Does Allura have any idea where he might have landed?" Shiro asked after a moment.

  
"If he's landed," Lance said, gesturing wildly at the sky above them. "He might still be floating out in space for all we know. He might have been burnt to a crisp in the atmosphere-"

  
"Alright, let's not jump to conclusions. You're going to have my eye out if you keep doing that," Shiro said firmly, gripping one of Lance's waving arms and pushing it back down until the younger man reluctantly stopped moving. Slowly, he repeated, "Does Allura have any idea at all where Keith might be?"

  
"No. None." Lance's shoulders slumped. "She lost track of him."

  
"OK." Shiro looked thoughtful for a moment, then asked, "Can I borrow your helmet?"

  
Lance handed it over, and Shiro held it between the two of them so they could both hear Allura's responses before he spoke into the microphone.

  
"Allura, if we describe our location to you, can you perhaps try to work out where we are? We can try to get back to you, and then we can search for Keith."

  
"Is your locational data not working?"

  
Lance hadn't looked at his own; he hurried to check it, while Shiro confirmed that the Black Lion's compasses and mapping weren't functioning correctly. When Lance returned to report that the Blue Lion's were the same, Allura made a sound of irritation.

  
"Then it's probably down to the magnetic field of the planet you're on. Go on - describe it to me and I'll see what I can do. If I don't recognise it, maybe Coran will from that giant stew of useless facts he keeps in his brain."

  
"I heard that!"

  
Despite himself, Lance managed a smile at the distant voice, a small reminder of the banter between the crew during their days in the castle. As his gaze drifted up past the dense canopy of trees above, the smile faded. Beyond that innocuous blue sky was a landscape they didn't know, a journey they might not be able to make, and the knowledge that one of their crew members may not have even survived. It had been a welcome relief to hear the voices of his Altean companions, but he was acutely aware they were still potentially thousands of light years away. In all his years of training at the Garrison and learning to become a paladin, suddenly in the vastness of space he had never felt so small.


	3. Distance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for your comments/kudos on the first few chapters! I hope you continue to enjoy it.

Outside the glass of the control room's window, wispy clouds curved across a cool azure sky. A flock of vibrantly-coloured birds glided overhead while tall grass waved in the breeze across rolling hillsides.

  
Inside the castle, the atmosphere was far less serene.

  
"Princess!" Coran protested as Allura paced across the control room floor for the seventeenth time since her communication with Lance had ended. He felt worn out just watching her. "Sit down and have something to eat!"

  
"This is not the time for a snack, Coran," Allura snapped, finally coming to a halt. She was silent for a moment, then her shoulders slumped. When she spoke again, her voice was much softer. "I'm sorry. I'm just..."

  
"You're worried. We all are," Hunk said gently, heading over from the doorway where he had been hovering with some degree of nervousness since Allura had started striding to and fro. He offered her a plate filled with his latest attempt at making an appetising meal from the 'food-goo' that was the castle's only nutrition source. "You won't be able to provide help to the others unless you eat something, Princess."

  
Allura suppressed a sigh. Not only was Hunk correct, but she was also unwilling to hurt the young paladin's feelings by refusing the meal he had made for her, however much her stomach roiled at the thought of it. How could she even think about eating when two members of their team were trapped on an unidentified planet who-knew-how-many miles away, and the other was...

  
Her breath caught in her throat, the very thought of Keith's potential fate hurling up a thousand memories of her last day with her own people. The desperate feeling of being pushed into a cryo-pod, forced into an unnatural sleep with no idea who would be there to greet her when she woke up - how much of her home planet still stood. She was armed with knowledge now, but no closure. Zarkon had destroyed Altea, brought the existence of her race to an abrupt end, and she hadn't yet been able to strike him any sort of blow in return.

  
Keith's disappearance gave her the same suffocating sensation of being absolutely helpless. A cut-off point with no closure. Did they grieve? Did they strike out in any random direction and try to find him? The thought might have been laughable in its futility if it didn't simply make her want to cry. There was a high possibility he was already dead. What were the chances of him crash-landing on a friendly planet, with so many already taken over by the Galra forces? What were the chances of him surviving a crash-landing in the first place?

  
"Princess?" Hunk asked hesitantly, offering her the tray again. Jolted out of her thoughts, Allura blinked at him, before she managed a smile and took the proffered food.

  
"Thank you, Hunk. You're very kind. Say, do you know where Pidge is?"

  
"Right here, and not far from forging a connection with... ah!"

  
Allura, Hunk and Coran all looked in different directions simultaneously, before their gazes finally settled in the same place; a balcony above that opened out from one of the castle's upper corridors. Pidge was hunched against the railings with her laptop propped up on her knees, frowning with concentration. She pressed a few more buttons, and finally allowed a satisfied smile to spread across her face.

  
"Just got us hooked up to a satellite ten thousand light-years off. An abandoned vessel that's been inactive for a good few years. It's not much, but it's something. Might allow us to keep an eye out for the others."

  
"That's great, Pidge! Let me know if you need a hand," Hunk called up, poking a straw through a carton of 'space juice' as Lance had dubbed it. Bright purple liquid bubbled up through the hole and dribbled onto the floor. "Aw, man."

  
"Ha!" Pidge crowed. "And you laughed when Shiro did that."

  
"Shiro is a Garrison pilot, I'd expect him to be able to open a juice carton."

  
"And you're a Voltron paladin, what's your excuse?" Pidge retorted, then abruptly fell silent. When Allura looked upwards, she saw that all traces of humour had faded quickly from their youngest team member's face. There was a pause, then Pidge murmured, "Do you think we'll ever see them again?"

  
"Of course we will!" Coran said loudly before Allura or Hunk could respond. "Absolutely no doubt about it! If anyone tries to attack them out there, I'm sure our Shiro will be able to - _ha!"_ He gave a high kick that almost knocked Hunk's juice carton out of his hands. "And then a - _hey!"_ The next move was a quick swipe with his arm that Allura blocked before he did himself or anyone else any damage.

  
"I'm not sure that's quite Shiro's fighting style, but we get the idea," she said dryly.

  
"And Keith?"

  
Pidge's voice was very small, made fainter still by her position on the balcony. No one spoke for several long seconds.

  
"Keith is a strong individual," Coran replied softly. His voice was surprisingly gentle - the same tone he had used to comfort Allura when she came to the realisation that she would never see her family again. Not for the first time, she found herself extremely grateful that he was here. "He's very independent, I think we can all agree on that."

  
There were murmurs of agreement all round and a soft chuckle from Hunk as he no doubt recalled their numerous attempts to cajole Keith into joining them in training sessions or simple conversations. He declined most invitiations extended towards him, usually without any concern for politeness.

  
"As long as he hasn't been separated from Red, I think he should be fine," Allura muttered.

  
"Shiro and Lance are still with their lions. There's a high chance Keith still has his," Hunk said encouragingly. Pidge nodded slowly, but didn't look convinced. After tapping a few more keys she closed her laptop and made to head for the stairs, but Hunk opened his arms and grinned. Pidge blinked, then managed a smile back, before leaping over the railings. Allura flinched, but she had no need to worry; Hunk caught the smaller paladin flawlessly and gave her a brief hug before placing her down on the ground. Suddenly, Allura found herself wishing she could find an excuse for a 'Hunk hug'. They looked very pleasant.

  
"I do have... other concerns," she murmured, placing her untouched meal on a nearby table.

Coran looked puzzled. "How do you mean?"

  
"I'm thinking of Lance and Shiro," Allura replied. Her long hair was hot on her neck; she pulled it quickly up into a knot at the back of her head as she spoke. "Until we manage to further narrow down where they've ended up, we can't begin travelling. We're in limbo. And in the meantime..."

  
"In the meantime... what?" Pidge asked slowly, concern growing in her eyes.

  
Allura exhaled, clasping her hands in front of her and resisting the urge to fidget. Princesses should not fidget. Neither should the commander of the Castle of Lions. "I'm... worried for what the wound that Shiro received from Haggar could mean."

  
"Wound?" Pidge echoed. "What wound?"

  
Of course; Pidge and Coran didn't know anything about it. They hadn't seen Shiro since before he ended up crawling inside the Galra ship after being thrown from his lion. That in itself was another concern.

  
"Haggar dealt Shiro a blow before we managed to escape." Allura straightened her shoulders, maintaining firmness in her voice. This was not an easy conversation. The last thing she wanted to do was instill doubt in the two paladins still with her, to cause any loss of trust between them and their comrades. But it had to be said. "I am worried it may not have been an ordinary injury. There was no blood, but... a violet glow."

  
"A glow?" Pidge's eyes were wide behind round glasses. "Like... Galra tech?"

  
"Like Galra tech, and weaponry, and pretty much anything else that comes from them," Hunk said, his voice unusually grim. "It probably doesn't mean anything. Just... residue from the attack, or whatever."

  
Of course he would immediately defend their leader. Allura wanted to do the same herself. But alarm bells had rung in her head the moment she and Hunk had dragged Shiro from the depths of Zarkon's ship, and they needed to be warned. Her throat felt tight. "Perhaps it doesn't. But I am concerned that it could affect him in ways a normal injury wouldn't. Perhaps he could have been poisoned... or the Galra energy now present in his body could be used to control his mind."

  
The fact that Hunk had completely bypassed the idea of the attack poisoning Shiro gave away that his first concern was exactly the same as hers. He had jumped to the Black Paladin's defense, but he had undeniably thought, for a split second, that this could mean Shiro could be forced to turn against his companions. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. Beside him, Pidge was frowning.

  
"No. I'm sure that couldn't... that wouldn't happen," the youngest paladin said quietly.

  
"I hope it won't. And when I spoke to Shiro, he seemed perfectly fine. I only considered it afterwards," Allura replied carefully. Pidge was tough; there was no doubt about that. But there was also no denying that being separated from the other paladins had shaken her up. Pidge had already been through so much. Her expression was twisted with worry beneath fresh bruises and cuts from their skirmish with Zarkon and the subsequent chaotic flight through the wormhole. The last thing Allura wanted was to give them any more reasons for concern, but she was the commander of the Castle of Lions, and it was her responsibility to be honest. Transparency was key; Shiro would drill that into the other paladins, and now he wasn't here, she needed to do it instead. Even if the fears she was voicing were about the Black Paladin himself.

  
She took a quick look around at her companions. Coran looked troubled, Hunk was wringing his hands together with an expression of helplessness and Pidge simply looked crestfallen. For the sake of having something to do, to distract herself, Allura turned and activated the computer on the pedestal behind her. A bank of holographic screens glowed into life, bathing the four in cool cyan light. There was a habitable planet within the same galaxy as Arus, not dissimilar to Earth - or at least, Allura had understood as much from Coran's rambling explanation. It matched the description that Shiro had give her, or the little detail that he could gather, of the place where he and Lance had landed. But there were many hundreds of other planets, further still, that could easily be the location of their crash-landing.

  
Allura felt terrible knowing that her companions could be waiting desperately for the castle to appear, while in reality it was simply sitting on Arus. But the entire reason they had headed to Arus in the first place was because the castle's own core power had been compromised by the Galra attack on the wormhole. Allura had not regained her full strength from her capture and the following fight, and neither had the castle-ship itself. They couldn't risk the long journey to the mystery planet just yet - if they arrived and it turned out to be the wrong place, they would not have the power to either return to Arus, or strike out for the correct destination.

  
And then there was Keith. Allura's hand twitched, and she zoomed in on a section of the map more quickly than she intended to. A moment later, Coran's hand gently touched her shoulder.

  
"Do you really think it necessary to inform them of your worries about Shiro, Princess?"

  
Her eyebrows lowered into a frown. "I have to be honest, Coran."

  
"I know, but..." He sighed, then patted her shoulder softly. "You know best."

  
"Except I don't, do I?" she muttered, hands falling from the console controls back to her sides. "I have no idea what I'm doing. I've been asleep for ten thousand years."

  
"As have I."

  
"I know, but you were my father's advisor. Now you're babysitting me."

  
"I am most certainly not 'babysitting' you," Coran said, a hint of sternness slipping into his voice. "These paladins rely on you."

  
"And I thought they relied on me to be honest," Allura whispered, suddenly doubting herself. Behind her, she could hear Pidge and Hunk's murmured conversation. She couldn't make out the words, but their emotions were clear through the tone of their voices, and her heart twisted. "Perhaps I shouldn't have told them."

  
Coran didn't speak for a moment, then he sighed. "We cannot deny there is a likelihood that Keith has not survived. In which case, we are not only mourning the loss of a team member - a friend - but we also cannot form Voltron."

  
"And if Shiro has been... _changed_ , somehow, by Haggar's attack..." Allura trailed off. She couldn't finish the sentence, but Pidge had overheard, and her voice cut across the control room like a knife.

  
"If Shiro's being controlled by Haggar... then we've just lost three paladins, because Lance doesn't stand a chance."  
Silence. No one responded, because there was nothing to say. Pidge was right, and here, with a damaged ship rooted to Arus with no sign of being able to take flight any time soon, they were helpless.


	4. Mirror

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for your continued reading!  
> I've included a reference in this chapter to the idea of the castle automatically translating between languages for the sake of simplicity (I just assumed it did, because why would the Alteans be speaking English?)  
> If you have any questions feel free to ask!

The spiked Galra logo felt as if it was burned into the back of Keith's eyelids. It was everywhere he looked, a glowing purple handprint that marred every surface. A steady violet light glared from the surrounding walls in between obsidian-black pillars, casting everything into an eerie half-light.

  
He kept his fists clenched at his sides as he followed the Galran soldier through winding passageways and darkened control rooms. The first figures they encountered had stopped and stared, only to laugh and slap Keith on the shoulder when their fellow Galran explained the 'truth' of his appearance there in the Red Paladin's uniform. Each and every time, Keith lowered his gaze to the floor, convinced that at any moment they would come to their senses and realise he was not who he said he was. How did they not know already? How did they not _see?_ He couldn't make any sense of it.

  
Presently, they reached a wider room dominated by a bank of enormous screens displaying maps of the compound and its planet, widening out to show its entire galaxy. Keith's heart sank as he realised that of course, all text was presented in the Galran language. He had no idea what any of it said.

  
Fortunately, it seemed things were not as complicated as he had feared. The Galran soldier, who was clearly desperate for some sort of promotion, eagerly showed him a collection of diagrams and maps displaying his current location and its distance from the Castle of Lions - which, as far as the Galra's detectors could tell, had landed once again on Arus.

  
Keith's frown deepened as he watched the holographic plans unfold in front of him. How was it that they always seemed to be able to track the castle, yet Allura couldn't sense the Galra until they were dangerously close? Did the Galra have some way to shield themselves? Or was it simply that the castle was giving off some sort of signal that no one on it was aware of?

  
They had been scrolling through maps and menus for a while when a tall figure appeared in the doorway and barked at Keith's surprisingly helpful companion that he was needed elsewhere. With a hurried bow the soldier rushed away, and Keith felt his heart sink. The man was his enemy, just like everyone else here, yet he had been foolish enough to prevent less of a threat. It was all well and good when Keith was running into a situation he had a good grasp on; he may not analyse every angle as he should do, which was a source of exasperation for Shiro and Allura, but if he knew roughly what he was doing, he should be fine. But this... he was on a mystery planet, deep in an enemy stronghold, with no semblance of a plan and the realisation that he couldn't remember every twist and turn that would get him back out of this structure.

  
Even by 'Keith standards', it wasn't good.

  
The figure in the doorway observed him for a moment with lambent yellow eyes. There was nothing particularly remarkable about him, but then again Keith considered that humans probably all looked the same to the Galra as well. His lip curled slightly in automatic derision before he schooled his expression back to neutrality.

  
"You," the stranger intoned after a moment. His voice was deep, filling the entire room and seeping into every gap and corner. "What are you doing here?"

  
Distantly, Keith realised that he was speaking English. There was no reason for him to do so, unless he was speaking to a human. His breath caught, then seemed to stutter and start again. No. He had been speaking to the Galran soldier since the moment he had arrived on this planet. There was simply some sort of translation device installed within the area, in the same way that the Castle of Lions managed to convert the Alteans' and paladins' speech so that they could understand one another. Slowly, slowly, he turned around.

  
"I work for Emperor Zarkon," he replied, hearing the tremor in his own voice. He cleared his throat, and tried again. "I have killed the Red Paladin and stolen his lion. I plan to infiltrate the Castle of Lions and fool them into handing over the rest of Voltron to me."

  
"Oh, my, those are lofty aims indeed," the Galra man replied, one eyebrow curving upwards. "Aims that are made difficult when you don't seem to be sure where you're going."

  
"I just needed to recap on some coordinates," Keith replied, then belatedly added, "Sir." He had no idea what rank this Galra stood at, or what were the proper titles to use towards various levels of their military forces. He didn't care. All he wanted was to get out of here; his body thrummed with the need to burst into a sprint, down the corridors, out the doors, into Red and away-

  
"You're lying to me."

  
Keith froze. He stared at the man through the glass of his helmet for a second - a second too long. When he spoke, his voice shook more violently than before.

  
"I - I don't know what you mean, sir."

  
The man smirked, pointed teeth glinting in the harsh cyan light of the floating screens. "You can drop the act. I know exactly what you are. We all do. You just strolled in like a fly into a spider's nest." He took a step closer, and Keith backed up towards the control panel. "A tiny, foolish, little red fly."

  
"I'm a Galran," Keith snapped, clenching his fists and resisting the urge to spit at the sound of those words coming from his mouth. The man looked at him for a moment, a considering expression crossing his face. His next words took several seconds to filter through into Keith's brain.

  
"Yes, you are. But you are also a paladin. And we can't have that."

  
Keith blinked, stepped forward, opened his mouth, and then shut it again when nothing came out. Finally, one syllable broke through the fog of confusion.

  
"What?"

  
"You are not lying when you state that you are one of us," the man replied smoothly, oh-so-calmly, as if he was simply relaying a series of tedious facts: a bus timetable, or a shopping list. Not this... this madness. "We have had a Galran among the Voltron paladins, ten thousand years ago. And here you are, another one, offering your services to us on a plate. I couldn't have planned it better myself."

  
Keith's head whirled. He backed up again, his legs weakening by the second.

  
"Th-that's... that's ridiculous. I'm not Galran. I'm not the same as you."

  
A frown twisted the other man's features. He looked, for a moment, genuinely confused.

  
"Do they not have mirrors in the Castle of Lions?"

  
Keith's breath hissed between his teeth and he spun to look for a reflective surface, something he could pick up and stare into and prove this smirking Galran wrong. The holographic screens and dull metal of the control panel were no help; he absently ran a hand over the glossy surface of his helmet as he thought, then gasped and pulled it off. The visor would do. He drew it in front of him to inspect his own reflection.

  
A clatter split the air as the helmet fell to the floor.

  
Keith's hands remained where they were, as if trying to grasp fistfuls of empty air. The Galran man smirked.

  
No. Keith bent down, painfully slowly, his body stiff and unresponsive. As if his entire being rejected the image that had been laid before him. It was all a trick, a lie. The atmosphere of the planet messing with his mind-

  
The hand that clutched the helmet was purple, tipped with black claws, and it was shaking.

  
Keith stared, trying to force his eyes to reevaluate, to throw aside the facade that had been thrown over his mind like a blanket over a confused animal gone wild. The sleeve and glove of his paladin uniform had never been fixed after his encounter with the Galra druid and the mysterious quintessence. It hadn't exactly seemed a priority when their next course of action was to rescue Allura. And he was sure, so sure, that the last time he had happened to glance down at his own hand, it had not looked like this...

  
A strangled sob escaped his throat, despite his desperate attempts to force it back down. With hands that felt barely able to hold the sudden dead weight of his helmet, he turned it around, and looked into the visor.

  
Yellow eyes. Pointed teeth. Purple skin. All in the uniform of the Red Paladin.

  
Keith screamed, the sound quickly cut off as the Galra man surged forwards and struck him across the face. He hit the control panel, sending a flurry of error messages across the screens. Somewhere deep in the compound, a siren began to wail. Keith snarled and swung around to grip the hilt of his bayard, but he was too slow. The man wrenched it from his fingers and hurled it away across the floor. Before Keith could dive after it, a knee was driven into his gut. He retched, and before he could regain his senses, an elbow came down on the back of his head.

  
Fireworks exploded behind his eyes. Distantly, he felt blinding pain, and saw the cold obsidian floor rushing up to meet him. Unconsciousness pulled him down before he ever hit it.


	5. Vulnerable

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a long one, but I really enjoyed writing it and exploring this part of the story. Of course, a considerable amount of it involves my own personal headcanon for the characters' pasts. Thank you for your continued reading and if you'd like to leave a comment I'd really appreciate it! :)  
> EDIT: Made some changes due to a couple of inconsistencies. Please do let me know if you see any more!

Lance's stomach rumbled. He made a mournful expression and pulled his knees up to his chest, trying to ignore the gnawing feeling of hunger in his stomach. He hadn't eaten since... since when? He couldn't remember. It was difficult to recall anything between the chaos of realising that Allura had been captured by the Galra, and their crash-landing here in the middle of nowhere. When he tried to cast his mind back, everything was a blur of colour and sound.

  
At least they had a fire. That was something. He grimaced. No food to cook on it though - the sudden thought of marshmallows caused a pang of longing in his chest. Marshmallows, of all the things to miss from his life back on Earth.

  
There was more than that, of course. But he had pushed it all to the back of his mind and was trying not to think about it. When he was back on the castle-ship, when he could lock himself away in his room and give in to his emotions, then he would allow himself to think of his family and his home.

  
Shiro had headed off a short distance to work on the lions' communication systems, leaving Lance with the utility belt the older man always wore over his everyday all-black clothes. Lance had yet to work out the mystery of where those clothes had come from, since all Shiro had had on his person when he was dragged from the Garrison quarantine vessel were his tattered Galra prison clothes. The only explanation was that Keith had held onto them in that tiny desert shack for a year, refusing to believe that Shiro would never come home. Had he had some sort of inutuitive notion, in the same way that he had been able to sense the presence of the Blue Lion? Lance would have to confront him about it, but in the meantime it would remain a mystery. His chest tightened slightly. Keith could be dead, and none of them would have a clue where he had ended up, how it had happened.

  
Lance played upon their false rivalry - mostly self-created, if he was absolutely honest with himself - but he didn't hate Keith. He thought, perhaps, that he could consider him a friend. It would feel as if a hole had been punched through the paladins' lives if they never saw him again.

  
Not that he would ever admit it to that smug Mullet-Head's face.

  
Lance idly picked up the utility belt and rummaged through it in the vain hope that Shiro had left some sort of food in the pockets. No such luck. Now that he thought about it, there wouldn't exactly have been a lot of opportunity for Shiro to find and hoard non-perishable foods while they were flying around in giant robotic lions trying to save the universe.

  
No food, but there was a flashlight, a ball of string, batteries, a pen knife, a few crumpled sheets of paper and a pencil. Two of the sheets felt thicker than the others, glossy on one side. Lance tugged them out, frowning, then his eyes widened.

  
Against the backdrop of a sunlit park, a couple smiled to the camera with two young children in their laps. The youngest beamed a gappy smile beneath a shock of black hair, a toy spaceship clutched in his hands.

  
Lance turned the photograph over to see scribbled numbers. The year predated the current by sixteen years.

  
Underneath it, the second photo looked to have been taken against the backdrop of the Galaxy Garrison. The sudden familiar sight of the deep grey walls and utilitarian corridors took him by surprise. More surprising still was the sight of Keith with a wide smile, ducking out of the way as Shiro ruffled his hair. Lance's eyebrows lowered as he studied the photograph, trying to work exactly why each of them looked so different. It wasn't just the fact that Keith had lost weight since being forced from the Garrison or the obvious physical differences in Shiro, from the Galra tech arm to the scar across his nose and the shock of white that cut through his hair. There was something else. The past year had struck like a hurricane, cutting away both their roots to their past lives and all the softness and innocence that had still been prevalent in their teenage forms. They were world-weary, harder, sharpened by experiences many did not have to cope with in an entire lifetime.

  
Lance tucked the photographs back in the pocket along with the other items and sat for a moment, watching the orange glow of the fire dance on the tree trunks. Then, abruptly, he got to his feet and headed off to find Shiro.

  
The other man was not working on either of the lions, instead simply sitting with his elbows on his knees at the edge of the wide clearing where the two beasts sat side-by-side. The cool glow of the mystery planet's two moons washed across the creatures' angular forms and picked out highlights on Shiro's black clothes. He had shed his paladin uniform and it lay slung across a large tree root next to Lance's.

  
"Hey," Lance said, picking his way through the undergrowth with the belt in his hand. "You didn't tell me you were so young, man. You _are_ the little kid in this one, right?"

  
Shiro glanced around in surprise, and distantly Lance noticed that he seemed to be holding his prosthetic arm in the other. As soon as he spotted the other paladin's gaze, Shiro lowered his hand back to the ground. "Hm? What are you talking about?"

  
"The photo." Lance waved the belt so the contents jangled slightly.

  
"Photo?"

  
"Of you and your parents. And your... brother?"

  
"Oh." Realisation flickered to life on Shiro's face, before his expression closed off completely. He turned away, the moonlight limning his tall form and casting him into silhouette. Lance's heart sank. "I... had forgotten it was there."

  
Lance had the distinct impression that that was not the whole truth, but he didn't want to push the other man. He spent most of his time pushing his luck, but now was not the time to do so. Not when they were so alone, so vulnerable. "Sorry. I shouldn't have said anything."

  
"No, it's alright." Shiro waved a hand in a non-committal gesture. He fell to silence again, and they were enveloped by the constant whir of unidentified insects and the whisper of a breeze amongst the treetops. It was a long time before Shiro spoke again, and when he did, he spoke slowly, as if each word was a struggle.

  
"It's not exactly... easy, to find out that you've been officially declared dead."

  
Lance blinked, and his grip tightened on the utility belt, which he belatedly realised he hadn't given back to the other man. Of course. He hadn't even thought about that. The moment the supposed fate of the Kerberos mission had been showcased on national news, Shiro, along with Samuel and Matthew Holt - Pidge's father and brother - had been presumed dead and that was that. There may not have been bodies, but there were memorials, and flowers, and relatives left behind to grieve with no closure. Lance's throat felt tight.

  
"I'm sorry."

  
Shiro nodded slowly, as if he acknowledged the other paladin's sincerity, but didn't quite know how to react to it. "I only found out after Keith told me when I woke up in that shack in the desert. Until then, it wasn't something that had even crossed my mind. Or maybe it had. I don't know. There are a lot of holes in my memory." He rubbed his forehead with an expression of frustration, as if the movement might encourage those lost recollections to come back.

  
"Must be difficult," Lance said softly. The words sounded hollow and awkward. That was what people said, right, to comfort those in distress? But they didn't mean anything. He wanted to do something to make it right. But how could he, sitting here stuck on an unknown planet thousands of light years away from home? It wasn't his place, anyway.

  
"I wish there was a way to let them know I'm alright," Shiro said after a pause, his voice barely audible. His gaze was focused on a stone he had picked up and was rolling between his boots, the moonlight glinting from his mechanical arm. "But I don't know if it would make things even worse, because I have no way right now of getting back to them."

  
"But at least then they'd know you're alive," Lance protested. "Surely that's better than them just continuing to live while believing you're dead."

  
"Is it?" Shiro mused. "I'm not sure how I'd even begin to explain what's happened. How I'm... not the same person I was before." His gaze drifted to his Galra arm, and Lance somehow knew he wasn't simply talking about the physical differences. "It's probably better for them to continue believing the same thing they've been believing for the past year. They've got used to it. They've moved on."

  
"Like hell they have," Lance snapped, leaping to his feet. His movement startled a group of bioluminescent moth-like insects into fluttering from the tall grass. Through the cool blue glow of rapidly-moving wings, he saw Shiro's eyes widen slightly at his outburst. "You don't get used to thinking someone's died - or even worse, never knowing what's happened to them. They're stuck in limbo down there - or up there, or wherever the hell they are compared to us." He waved his arms to indicate the vastness of space, his motions sharp and agitated. "They can't move on, and I can't believe you would convince yourself they will. They think you died alone, millions of miles away. No, it won't be easy for them to understand what happened to you on the Galra ships, or how you've changed. But it'll be a thousand times better than allowing them to think you're dead because you're too scared of how they might react!"

  
Shiro rose to one knee, anger flickering across his face. Somewhere deep in the recesses of his mind Lance knew he should stop, because he had already said too much, but he couldn't. He needed to let these words out, as harsh and biting as they may be.

  
"You don't understand," Shiro said through gritted teeth.

  
"I understand perfectly! I'm in the same situation as you, or had you forgotten?" Lance demanded. "The Blue Lion dragged us off into space and through a wormhole before we had any chance to realise what was going on. And, even though I understand her reasoning now, it doesn't make it any easier. It's been... well, I don't even know how many weeks now. As far as the Garrison is concerned, I just vanished along with Hunk and Pidge. Maybe they think we deserted. I don't know. I hope not, because all our stuff would have still been in our dorms." He paused, and his shoulders slumped. "It's probably not now. They've probably emptied them and made room for new cadets."

  
Shiro didn't speak for a long moment, then finally he let out a long sigh and threw away the stone he'd been playing with. It rolled down a small slope and hit Black's foot with a metallic thump. "That's how I got those photos back. And some clothes. Keith snuck into my dorm and fetched my belongings after they declared me dead. Otherwise I think they might have just thrown everything away. I suppose I was easily replacable."

  
"Easily replacable? I don't think so," Lance snorted. "You're the best pilot the Garrison's even seen. That's why you piloted the Kerberos mission. That's why you're the head of Voltron."

  
The corner of Shiro's mouth quirked up into a half-smile, but it didn't reach his eyes. "I appreciate the compliments."

  
"They're not just pointless compliments, they're true. I'm not just saying it."

  
"I know." It seemed that Shiro didn't know how else to respond to that. There was another short silence. Lance had completely lost track of time. He never wore a watch, not that there was any point when they were constantly leaping between timezones.

  
"Keith called you Takashi," he said quietly, leaning back on his hands. "Back at the Garrison."

  
"Yes," Shiro replied, equally softly. "How did you know?"

  
"Because I've heard him calling you it when he thought the rest of us weren't in earshot."

  
"Ah." Shiro managed a small laugh. "I guess he's trying to maintain a semblance of professionalism in front of the rest of you. Tough-guy Keith doesn't do friendship."

  
"Were you close? In your Garrison days? I mean, I know you worked together, obviously, but I wondered from... well, the photo," Lance finished off lamely, realising he was referring again to something that was none of his business.

  
"Yes," Shiro said simply.

  
"Do you think that... maybe, the reason he got kicked out of the Garrison was because he couldn't cope with believing you were dead?"

  
Shiro didn't respond for several long seconds. Then he replied, "I don't know, Lance." His tone was impossible to read, and his face was turned toward the stars.

  
The younger paladin leant back further, until his weight was on his elbows and he could get a better view of the sky with its unfamiliar constellations. He was delving into uncomfortable territory again; he needed to change the subject. "So, uh... where did the name 'Shiro' come from if you were known as Takashi in the Garrison?"

  
"There was another Takashi in my regiment. Most knew me as Shirogane anyway so it just became 'Shiro' for the sake of simplicity all-round." He leant forward and rested his chin on his hands, looking up at the enormous metallic beast that stood high above them. "Ironic, really, for me to end up piloting the Black Lion."

  
A breeze picked up, tugging at Lance's jacket and pushing the whitened strands of Shiro's fringe across his forehead. Several vibrantly-coloured leaves dashed across the ground. Finally, Lance spoke again.

  
"I'm sorry for what I said earlier."

  
Shiro looked his way, then back at the sky. "It's alright. I can understand your anger." He paused, expression conflicted as if he wasn't sure whether he should let his next words escape or not, then finally confessed, "I'm scared."

  
Lance blinked at him. "Scared?"

  
"Yes." Was that shame on Shiro's face? "I know I shouldn't be. I'm the leader of the Voltron paladins, the Garrison's favoured pilot... the Galra's Champion." His voice twisted at these last words. "I shouldn't admit to these things."

  
"Don't be ridiculous!" Lance burst out. Shiro looked so startled that he had a bizarre urge to laugh. "Of course you're scared. I'd think you were an idiot if you weren't. And-" he cut in when the other man opened his mouth to respond, "I know you're scared about more than just facing Zarkon and getting back to the castle and forming Voltron and all of that. I know you're scared of contacting your family again and not knowing what they'll think of you. But it'll be OK. They love you. We love you. I know it'll be OK."

  
Shiro simply looked at him for a moment, then abruptly turned away and swiped a hand roughly across his face. Lance hadn't missed the glint of tears in his eyes.

  
"It's OK to cry," he said softly.

  
"I'm not crying," Shiro replied, his voice muffled behind his arm.

  
"It doesn't make you any less strong to display your emotions."

  
"Says the guy who pretended he wasn't crying either," Shiro muttered, still not removing his arm.

  
"Touché." Lance smirked and leant back again to look up at the sky, humming softly. A good few minutes later, Shiro resumed his previous position with his elbows on his knees, but the lingering blush that travelled right to the tips of his ears told Lance everything he needed to know. He didn't tease him any more. Instead, he studied the rugged shape of the two lions sitting side-by-side above them.

  
"No luck on fixing the comms?"

  
"No. I haven't heard from Allura any more either." Shiro gestured towards Lance's helmet, sitting beside the rest of his uniform. They had never managed to find Shiro's. "She thinks she might have a vague idea of where we are, but there are several planets within this galaxy fitting the description. She needs to allow herself to return to full health before she can create wormholes for the castle again."

  
"So... we're stuck here," Lance muttered, attempting to sound casual. He failed miserably.

  
"Not permanently," Shiro replied, his voice taking on the calming, fatherly tone that Lance and the others had become so familiar with. Immediately he was reminded of his discovery via the photos he had found earlier.

  
"I still can't believe you're only - what, twenty? Twenty-one?"

  
"It hadn't even occurred to me that I was," Shiro murmured thoughtfully. "I guess my twenty-first passed while I was... with the Galra."

  
"Oh." Lance felt his face fall, then he brightened again. "We should have a party when we get back to the castle!"

  
Shiro looked as if he was suppressing a sigh. "No, let's not do that."

  
"Oh, come on! It'll be fun!"

  
"No, it won't."

  
Lance pouted. "Please? It'll be something to look forward to."

  
Shiro glanced his way, saw his pleading expression, and rolled his eyes. "Fine. We can have a party. Just don't tell them it's for my twenty-first. Coran already calls us 'youngsters' enough as it is."

  
"You worried about losing your sense of authority?"

  
There was that telltale blush again, spreading all the way to his ears. Lance might happily keep the secret of Shiro's age, but in return he would enjoy informing everyone that their cool and collected leader was a full-body blusher. "Perhaps."

  
"Fine, I'll tell them it's your fortieth."

  
"Lance, _no!"_

  
Shiro looked so distraught that Lance burst out laughing, only realising as he did so that it felt like the first time he had laughed in days. It felt wrong, when he remembered Keith, and the other paladins so far away. Abruptly, it faded as quickly as it had come. Shiro watched the change with a solemn expression, and Lance considered fully for the first time the sheer turmoil that must have been going on inside the other man's mind. Keith was... well, he wasn't sure what he was to Shiro, but he clearly meant a lot to him. To think that he could have died in the void of space was probably tearing him apart.

  
"So..." he said after a beat of silence. He needed to fill the gap, but hadn't considered what with. His gaze drifted up to the lions again, and he latched onto them. "Is Black working fine now, apart from the comms? After... after what happened." _After Zarkon took control. After Black rejected you._ The words floated to the forefront of his mind, brutal and cold, but he shoved them back.

  
Shiro stiffened, barely perceptibly, but Lance saw it. "It's all fine."

  
"Have you had the chance to really check how things are since the wormhole incident?"

  
"I'm sure it's fine."

  
"Being 'sure' isn't good enough, Shiro," Lance said, his voice unintentionally harsh. He froze when the other man slowly turned his gaze on him. He had crossed a line.

  
"I know, Lance."

  
His tone told Lance not to argue, not just because of the hint of anger that had slipped into it, but because Lance had seen the frustration, the hurt, that had appeared so briefly on his face. He was clutching his prosthetic arm in his other hand again, and his expression had tightened slightly in pain. This was not the time for this conversation.

  
Lance unfolded his wiry frame and got to his feet, stretching with a groan. The casual motions were so forced he already knew Shiro would see straight through them. "I'm going to try and get some shut-eye. Wake me if anything interesting happens."

  
"Goodnight, Lance," Shiro murmured without turning around.

  
Lance watched the other man's still form for a moment, then exhaled slowly and turned to head back toward the warmth of the fire.

  
"Night, Shiro."


	6. Void

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading so far and I hope you continue to enjoy it!
> 
> EDIT FEB 2017: I've made some edits for the sake of reading flow but please bear in mind I wrote this before series 2 so Keith's past is entirely my own headcanon!

Consciousness came back in a slow trickle of colour and sound. Blackness drew back to reveal a blur of grey, brown and red that merged together nauseatingly before finally beginning to separate and solidify. There was a constant hum all around, a vibration in the air; the kind of sound that would make you go mad if you let it. Over the top of this perpetual rumble, voices ebbed and withdrew like a tide. He couldn't understand the words.

  
Keith's eyelids twitched, and his eyebrows drew down very slightly in a frown. They had been speaking English in the Galran compound. Why was that? If they believed he was one of them right from the start, wouldn't they have just...

  
No. They had known what he was - even before he did. It had all been a ruse. He had been well and truly fooled. His stomach twisted with self-loathing, and he pushed back the urge to retch. The metallic tang of blood was harsh on his tongue.

  
Galran. He was Galran.

  
It was ridiculous, laughable. Insane. He wanted to scream and laugh and cry all at the same time. He was from Earth. His parents had been human. The image in the visor of his helmet had simply been some sort of hologram, a trick of the light, he didn't know and didn't care. But it was wrong.

  
He flexed his fingers, finding that his wrists were locked into metal shackles behind the back of the hard seat he was slumped over in. The constant vibration continued beneath his feet. They were in motion.

  
Keith tried to lift his head, then hissed in pain as every part of his body protested. It felt as if someone had caved in his skull with a sledgehammer. There was a dull ache in his back, and a cut in his lower lip that was still dripping blood sluggishly down his chin. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, trying to figure out if he had lost any teeth in the fight that had left him unconscious, only to freeze as he touched the tips of four razor-sharp canines. They were easily twice as long as the rest of his teeth. He couldn't look at his hands, bound as they were, but he didn't need to. The image in the reflection had been right.

  
A sound escaped his mouth, part-growl, part-sob. His emotions were a mess, and he needed to get a lid on them. But where to start, when everything was so horrifically wrong?

  
"Ah, we have life."

  
The voice was instantly familiar, striking fear deep into Keith's heart and setting off alarm bells in his mind. He lifted his head, ignoring the pain, gritting his teeth as he met the glowing yellow eyes of Zarkon. Lambent and without iris or pupil. Inhuman. Just like his own.

  
Beyond the tall figure before him crouched the bent shape of Haggar, cloaked in black, and a line of Galran soldiers standing to attention. Keith didn't need to look behind him to know that there would be yet more against the far wall. He wanted to laugh bitterly. As if he could do a thing to threaten them now.

  
It had been clear from the moment he woke up that he was no longer in the compound, but i was only now that he truly took in his surroundings. Above him curved the glass ceiling of the ship's control room, looking out into empty space. Stars dotted a nebulous sky in flickering hues of red, purple and green. A gas planet loomed on their left, tinting the interior of the ship in the red of rusted iron. Keith had no idea where they were. The furthest reaches of space, perhaps. His hopes of ever seeing his fellow paladins - his family - again had crumpled into a tiny ball in his chest, hard and cold.

  
"Oh, you're not feeling so talkative now?" Zarkon asked, tilting his head to the side mockingly. "That's a shame, you seemed so willing to tell us all about yourself earlier. About how you're a Galran disguising yourself as the Red Paladin to infiltrate the Castle of Lions."

  
Keith said nothing.

  
"It's funny, really," Zarkon continued conversationally. "Because that's exactly what you are."

  
"I'm not Galran." Keith's voice was barely audible.

  
"Excuse me?"

  
"I'm not Galran." This time the words were stronger, and he struggled against the metal that locked his wrists in place. There was a clank of armour behind him as the guards moved, but Zarkon held up a hand to stop them.

  
"At ease. I don't think our friend here represents much of a threat right now."

  
Keith stared at him, willing every shred of rage he could muster to make itself apparent in his gaze. He wondered how his fury looked, coming from Galran eyes. A shudder ran deep through his body, and the shackles clicked sharply against the back of the chair.

  
"You are partly correct," Zarkon remarked, as if there had not been an interruption. "You are not full-Galran, otherwise you would not have had the ability to disguise yourself as a human."

  
Keith stared wordlessly down at his own shoes as his mind tried to piece through one revelation after another. He was still half-human. He was still part... _himself._

  
"Regrettably, the brat princess Allura and her joke of an advisor are not the last remaining flickers of the Altean race in existence."

  
Keith's eyes widened. For a moment, he forgot to breathe.

  
"Do you know who the original paladins were, Keith?" Zarkon spoke his name as if it was something disgusting on his tongue.

  
Images ran through his mind one after the other, merging together and finally slowing to reveal a brief instant from his fight with the Galran Emperor. The moment he had truly looked at the weapon Zarkon used for the first time. A metallic black hilt that could transform to take multiple forms...

  
"A bayard," he muttered, his voice hoarse. "You have the bayard. You were the Black Paladin."

  
"I still am the Black Paladin," Zarkon hissed, leaning forward to rest his hands on either side of Keith's chair. The younger man twisted away from the sight of his glowing eyes and the smirk that broke the scar running down his face.

  
"Like hell you are," he snapped, wishing for nothing more than these shackles to snap so he could deal the punch he was itching to give. "Shiro is the Black Paladin."

  
"Your precious Shiro is an imposter, a fraud," Zarkon snarled. He drew back slightly, and when he spoke again, his voice was calmer, perfectly self-assured. "A temporary problem."

  
Keith's breath stuttered again, and he looked at the Galran in wordless horror.

  
"As I was saying, I believe the princess has not explained the true legacy of the original paladins to you," Zarkon continued, his tone twisting into derision at Allura's title. "Alfor was one. The others are of little consequence. The only fact of relevance now is that the original Red Paladin was an Altean, and your mother."

  
Keith's mouth dropped open, but immediately he managed to find his voice. "That's ridiculous. Altea was destroyed ten thousand years ago. Voltron was disbanded ten thousand years ago. I don't think you've grasped the fact that I'm _nineteen years old."_

  
Zarkon looked at him for a moment, then laughed. Haggar joined in with her deep croaking voice, and after a moment so did the surrounding soldiers. Keith shrank back in his chair as their howls and jeers bounced from the glass ceiling. Somehow, this was worse than a punch in the gut.

  
"You may have nineteen of your Earth years stored within your memory, yes," Zarkon replied when he had recovered himself. "The remaining nine thousand, nine hundred and seventy-one were lost in your memory wipe after you were hurled from a burning Altean ship into the atmosphere of Earth."

  
Keith didn't speak.

  
"Your father was a Galran soldier of little consequence," Zarkon said dismissively. "I assume he and your mother encountered one another whilst the two races were still peacefully trading. It's of little interest to me. But your mother knew you would be of interest to us when we fought to take Voltron from Alfor. With you being the offspring of the Red Paladin, there was a chance you may follow in her footsteps. We wanted you, but she sacrificed herself and took the risk of hurling you into space with only a feeble cryo-pod to protect you. And here you are, almost ten thousand years later, exactly as we had hoped. I couldn't have planned it better myself."

  
Keith wanted to be sick. He wanted to purge himself of every word that had spilled from the other man's mouth, to burn them from his memory and never hear them again. He was human. He was the Red Paladin. He was Keith.

  
Just Keith. He had never really been anything else. Once he was in the Garrison, he could be someone. Top of the ranks. One of the best pilots they had seen, aside from Shiro, of course. His throat tightened at the thought of the other man until he felt he couldn't breathe. One day, his world had collapsed, the earth pulled out from beneath him. Shiro and his companions were missing, presumed dead. The Kerberos mission was named as the worst space exploration disaster in a hundred years. And yet, no one knew exactly what had happened, because there was no evidence, no memory log from their missing ship. No bodies and nothing to show that they had ever lived and spoken and breathed in the first place.

  
_"Just give it up, Keith! They're not coming back. I know he's your friend, but you have to stop."_

  
He could still remember the words of his fellow pilots in the dorms as he searched feverishly deep into the night for reports, sightings, any scrap of speculation he could find. First they were concerned, then they were exasperated. Eventually, when Keith no longer turned up bleary-eyed and exhausted to exercises and stopped attending at all, they gave up.

  
The final straw came when a lieutenant found Keith - already on suspension for unauthorised absence - using a computer he had stolen from the Garrison's private offices to search through confidential files at the root of the Kerberos mission.

  
_"Just give it up, Kogane! Shirogane's dead - you need to get used to it!"_

  
Keith's fists had flown before his mind had time to catch up, but he didn't regret it. Not even when he was dismissed from the Garrison the following day and found himself standing with the locked gates to his back, staring out into the empty desert. He wouldn't stop. It was not an option. He found an abandoned shack, a ruin, and fixed it up. Then, he resumed his search.

  
A search that had led to more than just finding Shiro again. He had discovered the hiding place of the Blue Lion. But why Blue? Even Lance hadn't been able to sense it. He had found the beast through pure chance, by waving his stupid arms around in that cavern and activating the wall paintings that hurled them into the depths where the lion resided. There was no reason for Lance to have discovered the Blue Lion first, unless... he possessed innate abilities than his human comrades did not.

  
Keith's teeth ground together, and he clenched his fists in their bindings. He had thought he finally had somewhere he belonged. A family. A home. Dysfunctional and at times downright ridiculous. But they were together, and that was what mattered.

  
He tried to dredge up memories of his parents, but he couldn't summon them. There weren't even blurry recollections of their faces. Where he had lived during his childhood? Lance was always rambling on about his enormous family and their frequent gatherings complete with endless plates of mouth-watering food. Pidge talked, reluctantly at times, about her father's encouragement and her brother's kindness. Hunk would often proudly mention the achievements of his younger siblings. And, though he had never once discussed them since he was rescued from the Galra, Shiro had told Keith long ago about his small but close-knit family back in Japan, and their enormous pride at his achievements in the Garrison.

  
And Keith... Keith wanted to join in. He knew he seemed bitter and uncommunicative - and sometimes, yes, he was - but occasionally, he did wish he had something to chip in, some little anecdote or humorous table about his family and his home life. But there wasn't one. When he tried to dredge through his past and draw up fragments of his childhood, he couldn't. There was nothing there.

  
Just a yawning chasm. A blank.

  
His hands shook, and when he spoke, so did his voice.

  
"Why are you telling me this? Why would you want me to know?"

  
"A good question," Zarkon said, mocking thoughtfulness. "We thought it best that you... fully understand your heritage, in order to best grasp the powers that have been placed in front of you."

  
"What are you talking about?" A thought suddenly hit Keith, and he gasped. "Where's Red?"

  
"Your lion is safe. You will return to her soon."

  
"Why?" Keith tugged at his bindings again and heard the shift of weapons behind him as the soldiers readied themselves. "What are you going to do?"

  
_"I'm_ not going to do anything."

  
Keith looked between Zarkon and the cloaked figure beside him. Beneath the folds of the black hood, he was sure he saw the glint of a smile. "What's happening?"

  
"As I mentioned, the imposter currently wearing the mantle of the Black Paladin needs removing if I am to quickly gain control of Voltron. We'll work from the top down, as it were. You may have thought you were lying when you said you would infiltrate the Castle of Lions to fool the paladins and take control of Voltron, but you were not."

  
Ice ran down Keith's spine, freezing him to the spot, striking him to the core. "No way."

  
"Oh, it's no real issue if you fail your mission, as long as you don't die. We will still be needing a Red Paladin. Haggar can ensure the task is completed." Zarkon gestured towards the ragged figure, and a faint laugh drifted Keith's way. His toes curled in his boots.

  
"How?" He didn't think he wanted the answer.

  
"The wound that Haggar inflicted upon the false Black Paladin is no ordinary injury," Zarkon explained, his mouth twisting into a smile that sent dread creeping into every part of Keith's body. "It will drive him insane, force him to destroy his fellow paladins, and eventually kill him too so we don't have to deal with that messy aspect of the job ourselves. We'll be sure to recover that arm though - it would be a waste to lose such valuable technology. Or perhaps you could pry it from his corpse for us."

  
Blind rage struck. Keith screamed, fighting against the metal bindings with everything he had. There were no words in his cry; he didn't need any. He just wanted to hurt, to main, to kill everyone in this room. The fury swamped him like a tidal wave, barely allowing him to breathe. He didn't need to breathe. He wanted blood.

  
"Well, that anger will definitely come in useful," Zarkon remarked quietly, "but in the meantime... Haggar?"

  
He turned towards the white-haired figure, who raised her arms with a smile. Keith's scream became an agonised shriek as his body was enveloped in black lightning, then he slumped forwards and darkness swallowed him up again.


	7. Fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Upped the age rating a little due to some violence. Sorry for the wait in between chapters. I had some writer's block and also my Alphasmart has developed two dead keys so I had to manually add in all the missing letters once I transferred to the computer! So annoying.  
> Thanks for your continued support! :)

Sleep was evasive tonight, but Shiro hadn't expected it to come easily.

  
Insomnia was no stranger; if he hadn't spent most of his year in captivity perpetually on edge from both adrenaline and other, artificial substances, he might have drifted through the days in a sleep-deprived haze. It wasn't easy to shut off the constant chorus of screams and whimpers that had echoed through the corridors of the Galra prisons, and though the buzzing of insects on this alien planet were considerably less harsh to listen to, he still longed for the gentle hum of the Altean castle-ship. Its white noise had become a comforting blanket to aid his state of mind over the last few weeks. He shouldn't have allowed himself to grow used to it, to expect it - he should have known it could all come to an abrupt end.

  
Pain rippled through his right arm again, and he gritted his teeth as he gripped it with the other hand. Holding onto it had little effect, but it grounded him, helped him to remember that there were some sensations he still retained control over. He had managed to keep his expression neutral for most of his conversation with Lance, and had simply turned away and gritted his teeth when he thought the agony might make itself clear on his face. The pain in his side was constant, a burning sensation that crawled outwards to singe his veins and set nerve endings aflame. In contrast, the pain in his arm was sudden, shooting, gone as soon as it had come. Now, it had cooled again, and he exhaled slowly and leant back against the nearest tree.

  
First-aid training was, naturally, a heavy part of his duties at the Garrison, but given that the inhabitants of Earth had no idea of the existence of alien species, the knowledge of dealing with wounds dealt by extraterrestrial warriors was not exactly a consideration. His captivity with the Galra had taught him little, since he had spent most of his time on the operating table unconscious - fortunately - and therefore had no idea what had been administered to him and exactly what it did.

  
He did know enough, however, to recognise poison when he saw its effects.

  
Lance had headed back to the clearing where they had managed to start a fire with the supplies that Shiro carried everywhere for emergencies such as this. There had been no noise from his direction since the initial rustling sounds of him settling down to sleep, so it seemed he had had managed to drift off more easily than Shiro had. The older man had intended to keep watch, but his eyes had started to close of their own accord so he had planned for a quick power-nap. He needed to keep an eye out for trouble, but if Lance planned to snore the night away - which was likely - Shiro would be in a zombie-like state by the morning. However, even the plan for a brief nap had not gone as intended. Tired as he was, he could not sleep.

  
There was no question that the wound Haggar had dealt him was going to kill him. It was simply a matter of how long it would take, and whether he would be able to safely return Lance to the castle and his fellow paladins before that happened.

  
And Keith. Shiro's breath hitched and he scrubbed his face with his hands, wincing as the Galra tech sent a stinging pain through his skin again. He had no idea where Keith could have ended up and no way to begin searching. Pure frustration sent a growl sliding from between clenched teeth. He may never have spoken the words out loud, either back at the Garrison or in the castle, but he had sworn that he would always do everything in his power to protect Keith.

  
He had failed the first time, not because he had been captured on the Kerberos mission but because he had chosen to go in the first place. It was hardly a cinema trip he could have cancelled on a whim, but... Stars above, he felt so _wrong_. Everything from the last year was wrong.

  
Keith had never mingled well with others, his short temper and disinclination to engage in conversation not doing him any favours with his fellow students. Shiro was not so self-absorbed as to believe he had single-handedly managed to draw Keith out of his shell, but he possessed a similar dislike of small talk and was happy to simply sit in silence with his friend rather than fill every moment with meaningless chatter. Shiro had become mentor and friend to Keith, a calming presence to foil the younger man's spikes of temper and to listen when he wanted to rant about his classmates or his latest assignment. And then he had left for Kerberos, and Keith had been removed from the Garrison.

  
Shiro didn't know the whole story, and neither, he suspected, did the rest of the paladins. Keith was taciturn at the best of times, and when he did speak it was more often to draw attention away from himself and towards others rather than to discuss his own past or problems. At the same time, Shiro both doubted that he could possibly be important enough to be the reason behind Keith's dismissal, and worried that perhaps that could be the case. His thoughts were in knots and his chest tight with guilt. So much potential had been lost - Keith could have been an astounding space exploration pilot. And yet, he had found another skill-set, another calling in his place as the Red Paladin. They could do so much more together than they ever could alone.

  
If they ever found one another again. If Keith was still alive.

  
Pain lanced through Shiro's arm again and this time a groan escaped him as he curled in on himself. He didn't have much time. A week? Probably less. A matter of days. Even if Allura managed to regain enough strength to rescue them from this planet, they had no starting point for finding Keith. He could be in another solar system, another galaxy. The possibilities were, quite literally, endless. Shiro had always been an advocate for refusing to give up hope, the leader of the team who couldn't allow his companions to ever hear him consider failure. And he wouldn't - he couldn't give up on finding Keith. But he couldn't deny that he probably wouldn't survive long enough to do so.

  
He hadn't confessed his fears to Allura, of course, and certainly not Lance. The facade of leadership could not fall, especially not now. And how could he possibly explain it anyway? _'Hey, guys, just calling you from a few thousand light years away to tell you I might drop dead at any minute, so if you could pick Lance up now that would be great.'_ It was so ridiculous that he would have laughed if he had the energy.

  
He didn't fear death. When it had become a distinct possibility, a constant presence hovering over his shoulder like a shadow during his year of captivity with the Galra, it had become something other, a mere thread in the tapestry of his existence. Some days, standing on the blood-slick floor of the Galran arena with a blade in his hand and broken bodies at his feet, he had wished for it, because being snuffed out of existence would have been preferable to waking up every day and facing the monster he had become.

  
Truth be told, he had not expected to be chosen as the paladin of the Black Lion. Everyone else seemed to happily assume the mantle of leadership would fall to him since Lance had first asked for his advice when Blue sent them hurtling towards the wormhole that led to Arus. Lance, like Keith, didn't seem to do too well with obeying orders - which made Shiro feel all the more humbled at how he had treated him with such reverence on their first, rather unconventional, meeting. His actions he had led Hunk and Pidge to do the same in a time when they hadn't had the chance to make their own minds up about the stranger in their midst.

  
It soon emerged that Lance had once gone as far as to tell his fellow cadets that Shiro was his idol. It was a surprise, and extremely flattering, but he had managed to hide his embarrassment by quickly turning away. The dark blush that had spread right to his ears had not been one of pleasure. It was shame. The title was not deserved. He had once been a Garrison graduate, an accomplished pilot, strong and influential and whole. He was not any more. Takashi Shirogane had disappeared as thoroughly as the ship that he had piloted to Kerberos. All that remained was a shell of a man with a broken core, technology he didn't understand embedded within his nerves, and a year of emptiness where his memories should be.

  
No, he was not fit to be the Black Paladin, but he worried that his companions would not be able to find another before Zarkon caught up to them again. Unless, perhaps, Allura could take his place? He didn't know. The possibility had never been mentioned, so he had simply come to assume that she could not become a paladin. Perhaps Coran could. They had never said anything, but if the Black Lion was left without a pilot, what other option did they have?

  
_Keith,_ a voice deep in the back of his mind whispered insistently. _Keith could lead Voltron._

  
It was not the first time the thought had occurred to him, and not the first time he had pushed it away. He tried to tell himself it was simple favourism, or the fact that he had known Keith for far longer than the other paladins and could better judge how he would cope. N, it was nothing as shallow as that. Keith was capable, once he got past his own iron-hard conviction that he was only capable of forging his own path, not those of the people he fought alongside. But he couldn't do that to him; he couldn't put him straight in the line of fire. Not yet. It wasn't fair.

  
But then, what could he do? It wasn't as if there was a strong bond between Shiro and his lion, not any more. That was another realisation he had kept to himself - poorly, if he was honest. He was becoming too tired to keep up the facade, and he was pretty sure Lance was able to see through it. He could detect that something was wrong, but perhaps he wasn't aware of the extent of it.

  
It had taken several attempts for Shiro to reestablish a connection with Black after Allura and Hunk had rescued him from his confrontation with Haggar. He hadn't mentioned it, of course - in the heat of the moment, with Coran desperately screaming at the paladins to return to the ship so they could create a wormhole and flee, it would have only been a distraction. He was the Black Paladin, the head of Voltron, the leader. To descend into panic and admit that he could no longer forge a bond with his lion after Zarkon had ripped that connection away... He couldn't do it. And he had managed, in the end, to link with Black, to regain control and fly her safely alongside the Castle of Lions into the wormhole. But the connection was weak. It flickered and jarred, and he had the distinct sensation that Black no longer accepted his presence. She did not respect him. He didn't belong there.

  
Zarkon. Zarkon was the original Black Paladin. It was the only thing that made sense. How else could he have so easily assumed control over the lion, locking down the cockpit, drowning Shiro in the glow of a dozen purple screens with the spiked Galra symbol burning into his vision?

  
As long as Zarkon was still alive, how could Shiro ever truly be the Black Paladin? The only answer was that he could not be. He was nothing more than a fraud, falsely placed on a pedestal when he belonged nowhere near. Earth would no longer welcome him, for all that Lance insisted he could return home any time. Surely, beneath all the bluster and bravado, Lance had to understand that Shiro couldn't simply stroll back to the Garrison, to his family, and expect everything to continue as it had done before his disappearance. It was laughable. For a start, Matthew and Samuel Holt were still missing and according to Keith the Kerberos incident had been blamed entirely on pilot error. In the eyes of everyone who had ever watched the events of a year ago unfolding, anyone who had seen the broadcast announcing the untimely fates of those on the mission, Shiro had single-handedly caused the deaths of his two companions. He would be arrested, cross-examined, treated as a criminal.

  
And then there was the arm. The Galra technology now formed a part of him that he wasn't sure he could ever remove. The existence of aliens was not something the inhabitants of Earth were even aware of. They may not believe his story, especially when it came with so many holes. He would be a freak show at best - at worst, a prisoner once again.

  
The realisation was like a sledgehammer to the gut. How could he possibly begin to comprehend the situation? It would take a miracle for him to survive Haggar's attack, ensure the safety of his fellow paladins and help them to find a replacement for Black before Zarkon got there first. If he somehow managed to achieve this, he could no longer return to Earth, without first finding a way to remove the Galra tech from his body and then to prove his innocence in the Kerberos incident. Would the Garrison begin to search anew for Samuel and Matt when they learned the truth? Or should he strike out on his own and attempt to rescue them first?

  
Even considering his options was so ridiculous that he almost let out a bitter laugh. He would, most likely, not make it past his first goal. He would not live to see it happen. Keith was probably dead, and Lance would be next if Allura never managed to direct the castle-ship here. He didn't know what to do, and to know that he had been elected to this position, that Black had so misguidedly chosen him, was agonising.

  
A cry broke into his thoughts, and Shiro immediately froze, pain shooting though his arm again at the tension in his frame. No, it was not an attack, not even the wail of an animal in the night. It was Lance.

  
Shiro scrambled to his feet, one hand clutching his other arm to his body, and made his way up the loose soil of the nearest slope towards where their makeshift camp lay. When he broke through the trees he was met by the sight of Lance lying tangled in his jacket, which he had been using as a blanket, with his limbs stuck out at all angles. His shout quietened when Shiro entered the clearing, soon replaced by a low mumble.

  
"No... no, Pidge, that's what I said... I _know_ he doesn't look it. I swear... Shiro's, like, thirty-five with an allotment and... a collection of bad dad jokes." He laughed in his sleep, rolled over again and descended into nonsensical muttering.

  
Shiro scowled, feeling the telltale blush spreading across his face again. He had always looked old for his age, not helped by his height, his intense workout regime at the Garrison and his damaging experience with the Galra turning his hair prematurely white. But thirty-five? Surely that was pushing it.

  
He had turned around to head back to his spot and keep an eye on the lions again when another cry split the air, this one much more shrill than the last. There was no humorous chatter this time. The shout continued, ascending into a scream. A flock of jewel-bright birds burst from the undergrowth and disappeared through the canopy above with screeches of fright.

  
"Mom! Dad! No!" Lance clenched the fabric of his jacket so tightly his knuckles were white. His eyes flew open, wide but unseeing, as he stared at the visions of his nightmares - images Shiro could only imagine. A series of names followed his cry - brothers? Sisters? He closed his eyes again, his expression twisted with pain, and his words merged into a meaningless blur.

  
"Lance..." Shiro didn't know what to do. He was well aware that waking someone in the middle of a nightmare generally wasn't a good idea in case they became disoriented and even more alarmed, but he couldn't just leave him to suffer like this. Not to mention, in terms of practicality, Lance screaming at the top of his voice in the middle of the forest had the potential to bring trouble their way.

  
"Please don't kill them! Don't-" A tear streaked down the younger man's face, followed by another as he curled in on himself with his arms wrapped around his chest. Any attempts at words disappeared beneath a torrent of sobs, and Shiro's heart clenched. He had never heard anything like this from Lance, but that didn't mean it hadn't happened. For all he knew, their Blue Paladin could have been crying himself to sleep every night aboard the Castle of Lions. He had asked, of course - he had always taken it as his responsibility to check on the younger paladins at least once every day, but that didn't guarantee that their responses would be honest. Beneath his humorous antics and constant stream of overexcited chatter, Lance was only a teenager - a teenager very far from home, pulled away from everything he had ever known and given responsibilities he had never even dreamed of. It was no wonder he was frightened, and Shiro felt the sudden weight of immense guilt for not spotting it earlier.

  
He crossed the clearing in two strides and knelt beside Lance to clasp his shoulder gently. He didn't know if the younger paladin would even register that he was there, but thought that perhaps the contact would bring some comfort. Lance flinched, yelled out "No!" again, and then in sharp contrast to his words he sat up and grabbed Shiro round the middle.

  
Shiro froze, momentarily paralysed with uncertainty, before wrapping his arms around Lance as the other man pressed his face into his shoulder and sobbed.

  
"It's OK. It's OK." Everything was far from OK, but he was too cowardly to say anything else. He traced gentle patterns on Lance's back with his fingertips, and felt his companion's tense muscles relax slightly beneath the motion. Lance flinched, jolting himself into wakefuless, then spoke, his voice trembling violently.

  
"Sh-Shiro?"

  
"Yeah, it's me. You're safe. Everything's fine." Lies upon lies, but Lance was too vulerable for the truth right now. They were all too vulnerable for any of this, right down to the indomitable Allura. "It was just a dream."

  
"It was... it was..." Lance apparently did not have the words to describe the horrors he had witnessed, because he simply hiccupped and buried his face further into Shiro's shoulder. His breath left him in a long, trembling exhalation. "I'm so glad you're here."

  
There was that sensation of shame again, crawling across his skin like a sunburn. Shiro was very glad that the fire had died down and his face would be near-invisible in the shadows - not that Lance was looking his way, still clinging to him like a limpet. "I'm glad you're here too," he murmured after a moment. "I wouldn't want to be here on my own."

  
Every word was true, but Lance managed a weak laugh, muffled in the fabric of Shiro's shirt. "Yeah, sure. You'd be fine, survival expert with your utility belt full of matchsticks and batteries and... and... I don't even know what else you have in there."

  
"String. Maps, not that they're any use out here," Shiro muttered, figuring that perhaps listing simple objects may be a way to calm Lance's racing heart. It had always worked with Keith when he was feeling overwhelmed. Thinking of Keith made his throat tighten again, so he focused firmly on recalling every item in his pockets. "Pliers - Pidge borrowed them to rewire Rover. Flashlight. Paper for notes-"

  
"Spare eyeliner-"

  
"Spare eyeliner - wait, _what?"_

  
Lance cackled, and the usually irritating sound was like a cool breeze after the storm of earlier. "Hey, that's nice. Keep doing that."  
"What-" Shiro started to ask, then stopped when the clearing lit up with a vibrant glow. Violet light bled across Lance's back, picking out highlights on his short hair, illuminating the trees that stood around them like sentries and the embers of their dying fire. Shiro's Galra arm had activated itself, warmth spreading outward across its surface. Lance smiled slightly and relaxed further into the other man's arms, blissfully unaware of Shiro's growing horror. He had not done this. The technology had come to life completely of its own accord, and now it was growing hotter and hotter until-

  
"Ouch!" Lance tried to scramble away, but Shiro's arm was locked firmly around his back. "What the hell are you doing, man?"

  
"I'm not-" Shiro's voice was abruptly cut off; it felt as if a vice had locked itself around his throat. His vision blurred, darkened, and he thought he might be sick. Distantly he was aware of Lance still desperately trying to pull away from him, but his body was beyond his control. Pain roiled through the wound in his side, fire coursing in his veins. He wanted to scream but his jaws were locked shut, and even as he struggled, he felt his lips draw back in a snarl.

  
"Shiro? Shiro!" Lance's voice was high-pitched with terror. "What's happening?"

  
A roar echoed through the clearing, and belatedly Shiro realised that it had come from himself, barely recogniseable as his own voice. He shoved Lance to the ground, hand leaving his back to wrap itself around his throat. The world flashed purple and black. A spiked symbol, an image he had seen every day for one long, tortuous year, burned into his vision. Somewhere in the depths of his mind was laughter.  
"Shiro, stop! Please! I know this isn't you-" Lance's voice was cut off as Shiro struck him across the face.

  
Inside, he was screaming, a helpless bystander in his own body. He wanted to yell at Lance to run away and not look back, to flee to his lion and escape into the night. But he could do nothing; every movement was governed by the crushing presence in his mind, his own words locked in a throat that felt as if he was choking on knives. He watched as his own hands tightened around Lance's neck, as the life bled from the other man's eyes, and all the while, his arm and side and every vein in his body burned.


	8. Falling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: this chapter contains some scenes of self-harm so if you're sensitive to that topic please be aware! Please let me know if there's anything else you'd like me to warn for.
> 
> Another long chapter, this fic is going to be a long one because I'm incapable of writing short stories. I hope you don't mind and thank you so much for your kind comments so far!

The whine of insects was like a drill being driven directly into his brain. An intense pounding headache and the clinging sensation of nausea did not help - and why did his throat hurt so much?

  
Lance groaned faintly and the sound came out as little more than a rasp. He stared up a black sky dotted with foreign constellations and fought back the urge to be sick. Every vertebrae in his back felt as if it had been hit with a hammer, he imagined there was probably a fairly impressive bruise across his right cheek and his neck felt as if it was on fire. Pain needled at the base of his lungs as he tried to restore his breathing to a normal pace.

  
Concussion. Yes. Blue's rough landing on this alien planet. That made sense of the sledgehammer agony in his skull. But why his neck? Why did he feel as if he had been plucked from the brink of drowning?

  
It took several seconds for the events of earlier to filter through, but when they did Lance muttered a curse with the little breath he had left and stumbled to his feet. The stars wheeled wildly above and he made a grab for the nearest tree before he ended up flat on his face. Pressing his forehead against the rough bark, heedless of the sharp edges pressing into his skin, Lance took several deep breaths and tried by sheer force of will to stop the world from spinning around him. A lack of food and sleep plus a concussion and nearly being strangled to death by his fellow paladin had wreaked havoc on his body and mind. The last thought pushed back a strong urge to simply lie down and close his eyes. Shiro. He had to find Shiro.

  
After a good few minutes of trying to recover himself - it wasn't long enough, but he didn't have the time - Lance straightened up and looked around him with wary eyes. The clearing seemed exactly as it had been earlier, bathed in the cool glow of the two moons above. The Voltron lions sat side-by-side twenty metres away, Black dwarfing its smaller companion, exactly where they had been earlier. The only movement came from the tree branches above swaying slightly in a gentle breeze, and the flutter of moth-like insects nearby. Lance waited for a telltale flash of metal in the darkness, the deep violet glow of Galra tech. His breaths were loud amid the forest sounds, more so than usual with a distinct wheezing in his throat.

  
Nothing, and no indication to help him work out where the other man had gone.

  
Lance muttered a few choice words as he made his rather wobbly way over to the tree root where Shiro had left their uniforms. Shiro was always pulling him up on his language while Coran was merely fascinated to discover how many variations of curse words could be found in English alone. Allura had attempted to look disapproving, but had eventually thrown in a few questions herself out of, as she put it, _'a need to understand the language of our allies'_.

  
Pulled back into the present at the brush of insect wings passing his cheek, Lance blinked hard and shook his head. They would be fine. Shiro would be fine. The paladins would all be safe and happy and back together in no time. If he told himself enough times, it might turn out to be true.

  
Lance's helmet sat beside his crumpled uniform on the large tree root. As he picked it up, his reflection looked back at him with solemn and reddened eyes. Dirt marred his skin along with dark circles from sleepless nights, his right cheek dominated by a deep purple bruise. He brushed his fingertips across it and hissed in pain. It was lucky he hadn't lost any teeth.

  
There was no doubt in his mind that the Galra had brainwashed Shiro, or otherwise controlled his mind. Lance did not believe for a second that Shiro had attacked him of his own provocation, but that didn't make the events of earlier any easier to swallow. Shiro was a formidable opponent both in hand-to-hand combat and in the Black Lion; previously, Lance had felt nothing but pure relief at knowing he wasn't stranded here alone but with the paladins' leader figure, someone both physically and mentally stronger than himself. But with his body or mind - or both - out of his own control, Shiro was an incredible and immediate threat. Lance didn't know who he was most frightened for. If Zarkon, or Haggar, or whoever had brainwashed him could make him attack his companion, could they force him to hurt himself too?

  
And why had he stopped? Lance's hands lowered before him, still clutching the helmet, as the thought occurred to him. If Zarkon had wanted to use Shiro to kill him, he would have been dead - simple as that. Lance might have lauded his own abilities whenever he got the chance, but he couldn't deny that he wouldn't stand a chance against the other paladin in a physical fight. Shiro was older, taller, built so much more powerfully than Lance that it was almost laughable comparing the two. He was battle-hardened from years in the Garrison and as the Galra's prized champion. If Shiro ever truly wanted someone dead, there was a high chance they would end up that way.

  
The only explanation was that somehow Shiro had managed to regain control for long enough to stop before he killed Lance, and then to flee. He hadn't stuck around to ensure the younger man was alright - what did that indicate? Lance frowned slightly. Was he afraid that the Galra would resume control over him that quickly? Did he have an inkling that that was exactly what could happen?

  
Lance had a thousand questions and no answers. The only certainty was that he needed to contact Allura, and request help no matter how impossible it may seem. He couldn't do this on his own.

  
His breaths came quickly and shallowly as he waited for what felt like an age for the princess to answer his communication request. Finally, her static-riddled voice broke into the silence, and he let out an explosive sigh of relief.

  
"Lance? What is it?"

  
"I..." He trailed off. How did he go about explaining this one?

  
"Lance?"

  
Honesty was probably the best policy, but it didn't stop every word from feeling like a knife blade in his throat. "Shiro tried to kill me."

  
Allura didn't speak.

  
"Are you there?" Lance asked, panic slipping into his voice.

  
"Yes... yes, Lance, I'm here." She paused for several long seconds. "When did this happen? Where is he now?"

  
Somewhere in the back of his mind Lance realised that she did not sound as surprised as he'd expected, but he pushed the thought aside. "I don't know where he is. I don't know how long I was out for either. He - he tried to strangle me." His words tumbled over one another in their race to leave his mouth. It was a wonder Allura hadn't demanded that he stop babbling and start over. "I woke up a few minutes ago. He can't have got far, but I don't know whether to go after him, or... or if he might try again. The Galra have taken over his mind, Allura. It's the only thing that makes sense."

  
"I know." Her voice was subdued. Faintly, he could hear the murmuring of the other paladins in the background, and his heart ached to be able to see them, hold them. "The castle is still not back to full power, and I remain weak from my experience with the Galra. We'll come and find you - I promise you that, but I don't know long it will take."

  
"What do I do in the meantime?" Lance asked, hearing his voice sliding up an octave in terror. The mere thought of being left on this alien planet with a Galra-controlled Shiro was enough to send a shudder down his spine. How the situation had changed from just an hour ago. He had felt... frightened, yes, but comforted in the knowledge that he had a friend by his side, a smart and resourceful man he had idolised during his Garrison days and now fought alongside as a paladin. But now, everything had been turned upside down. Shiro had been the reason he was not out of his mind with fear. Now, he was the most immediate threat in a long list that Lance didn't even want to consider at this present moment. For all that he could hear the reassuring voices of the princess and his companions, he could seldom remember feeling so alone.

  
"I may have the strength to create a wormhole if your destination is too far for us to travel at normal speed," Allura said, ignoring a concerned voice in the background that sounded like Coran. "If you are on the planet I suspect you have landed on, we could reach you within hours. But in the meantime, please be careful. If Shiro returns to his lion, still under Galra control, he could be forced to leave the planet and join them."

  
That scenario hadn't even occurred to Lance. His breath caught in his throat for a moment. The only way he could attempt to prevent Shiro from leaving with Black would be to fight them in Blue. It took him a moment to find his voice, and when he did, it shook.

  
"I can't fight Shiro."

  
Allura didn't speak for several long seconds, but he had the sense that she understood the double meaning in his words. It was not simply that he wasn't strong enough, by himself or with his lion, to battle the Black Paladin. He wouldn't do it, no matter how strong he was, no matter how likely he might be to win. Allura knew that.

  
Finally, she replied, her voice slow as if she was still processing the situation even as the words left her mouth. "Stay near the lions. Don't try to search him out. That way, you won't become lost, and you'll know if Shiro returns to Black."

  
The end of her statement hung unspoken in the air. What else was Lance to do if Shiro attempted to leave, other than try to stop him? His throat felt tighter by the second, more painful than the moment he woke up beneath the unforgiving glare of the stars. A hundred different responses danced on the end of his tongue, pleas for her and the paladins to do whatever necessary to get here as soon as physically possible because he had no idea what to do. But he bit them back, and simply replied, "I will."

  
"Good. We'll make arrangements to head for what we believe is your location," Allura replied briskly, then paused. Her tone was noticeably softer when she added, "Be careful, Lance. I'll talk to you soon."

  
"Thanks." Lance listened to the faint click as the communication ended. The sudden lack of white noise in the speakers of his helmet felt somehow suffocating. He exhaled slowly, and it felt like sandpaper in his bruised throat.

  
He couldn't do as Allura had asked. No matter how much the logical side of him - however well-hidden it might be - protested that it was the safest option, he couldn't simply sit around and wait. Every instinct screamed at him to go and find his fellow paladin. If the Galra had regained control of him, they might not stop at harming Lance. Perhaps they didn't want their champion back after all, or it was too much hassle to retreive him. If that was the case, the most obvious solution would be to kill him from a distance. Destroy the Black Paladin, and begin to dismantle Voltron from the top down.

  
No, he could not just wait around twiddling his thumbs and hope everything worked itself out. Shiro might not have returned to Black but that didn't mean there was no cause for concern.

  
Lance picked up his paladin uniform and pulled it on again, wincing as every injury protested. He didn't want to fight, but an ominous sense had settled in his chest; the knowledge that he would, most likely, need to defend himself. After a moment's hesitation, he grabbed his helmet and with one brief glance back toward the two lions he headed into the dimness of the forest.

  
If he was honest, Lance had no idea where he was going and no real plan. He had managed to make his way through life with this method up until now, but his time at the Garrison and even his conflicts as a paladin had never involved being left completely on his own to make potentially dangerous decisions. He wanted Pidge's nagging and Hunk's reassurance to ground him, to confirm that he was doing the right thing. He wanted Shiro's steadfast confidence, Allura's determination, Coran's seemingly endless knowledge of the universe. But they were not here. Trapped or brainwashed or dead, he didn't know, but he needed to make a decision and commit to it on his own.

  
Lance squared his shoulders, took a deep breath and walked further into the forest. Dapples of moonlight splashed across the tangled undergrowth, a soft breeze causing a sense of subtle but constant motion in the pale leaves around him. He looked back once to ensure the head of the Black Lion was still visible above the trees' canopy, then pressed further into the shadows.

  
Aside from a brief moment of panic when he spotted the movement of a small animal in the shadows, his journey was blessedly uneventful. It seemed that either there simply weren't many different species of living creature on this planet, or those that were present were only active in the daytime. Lance backtracked on himself a couple of times after finding his route blocked by a solid wall of tree trunks or knotted vines, and only managed to maintain his already-poor sense of direction by glancing back frequently towards the Black Lion's head above the treetops. Briefly he entertained the thought of what could possibly lie beyond the edges of this vast forest, but then decided it was probably better not to wonder. The chance of him finding villages populated by attractive aliens willing to give him food and baths and shelter were extremely slim. Baths. Damn. How long had it been since he'd enjoyed a decent bath? The Castle of Lions may be a highly advanced ship capable of light-speed travel and a plethora of technological advances, but its shower room left much to be desired.

  
A tree root seemed to appear before his foot and he tripped with a muttered curse, jolted immediately back into the present. When he lifted his gaze back to the trees before him, a soft purple glow met his eyes.

  
Lance drew in a sharp breath and froze for a moment, squinting into the dimness. Galra tech - there was no doubt about it. Who it belonged to was another matter.

  
He crept slowly forward until he reached a wide tree, pressing his hands against its bark and peering cautiously around the trunk. Beyond lay a small clearing, ringed by a tangle of underbrush and wreathed in shadows. The tree canopy closed in so tightly above that the choked moonlight barely managed to dot the inky ground with its wan glow. A tree even larger than the one he crouched behind took up most of the opposite side of the clearing, with a wide spread of knotted roots and enormous spade-shaped leaves. Beneath the umbrella of its branches, the feeble glow picked out highlights on a crumpled figure in dark clothes.

  
Lance held his breath, torn between moving to help and remaining in hiding, but the decision was taken away from him as he shifted in the dimness and a dry leaf crumpled beneath his foot. He cursed under his breath before his gaze darted back to Shiro. The other man's head had snapped up at the sound, his body taut as a bowstring. He stared into the darkness, and Lance stared back.

  
Blood and metal and wide frightened eyes. The leader of Voltron, the imperturbable Black Paladin, was unrecognisable.

  
For a moment of pure, utter panic Lance had no idea what to do. His gaze drifted across shredded fabric lying in tatters across blood-slick skin. Rivulets that ran black in the darkness traced paths across the surface of Shiro's Galra arm like shadows come to life. Tears streaked down a face as white as the tangle of hair across his forehead. As he looked blindly to the dark forest with pupils that almost swallowed the grey of his irises, his grip tightened on the knife in his hand.

  
Lance tried to speak, but nothing came out. He stopped, licked his lips, and tried again. "Shiro?" His voice was weak, but it was there.

  
The other paladin flinched as if stung. His gaze locked to Lance, but he didn't respond.

  
"Shiro, it's me. It's Lance." He stepped forward slowly, carefully, as if approaching an animal caught in a trap. The situation of earlier had been flipped on its head. Now it was Lance's turn to pull Shiro from the brink, to coax him back from the recesses of his own mind. His hands shook as he held them out before him. Fear for himself or for Shiro, he didn't know.

  
Shiro's breaths were shallow, rapid, as if the urge to run thrummed just beneath the surface of his skin. Slowly, while never taking his eyes off Lance, he lifted the knife in his hand and dug it into the scarred skin of his right arm, where metal met flesh. Blood bubbled from the wound to pool, slick as oil, on the ground.

  
"No. _No!"_ Lance forgot his previous hesitance, forgot everything but the need to stop this. He darted forward, stumbling on leaves and stones and loose soil, and practically threw himself on the other man. His grip closed around a wrist, an arm, but his fingers slipped on smooth metal and slick blood and he fell forwards, all coordination lost in the blanketing night.

  
_"Don't touch me!"_ Shiro's voice left his mouth in a roar, and one hard shove sent Lance tumbling across the hard ground. He landed with a wheeze as all the breath left his body, and found himself lying on his back looking blankly up at the sky.

  
For a moment, the branches above melded into a blur and the constellations danced while his already-fogged mind struggled to work out which way was up. He crawled to his hands and knees, pressed a hand to his head and tried to push back the urge to be sick. He failed, and ended up emptying the contents of his stomach into the undergrowth. Damn, this was some concussion. He didn't recall feeling this bad when he'd fallen out of a tree at the age of nine. Then again, that incident hadn't been immediately followed by someone attempting to kill him.

  
He was acutely aware that every moment he spent wheezing on the floor was another opportunity for Shiro to attack him, but when he finally recovered himself enough to turn around he saw that the older man had resumed his position beneath the tree. His knees were pulled up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them with the knife gripped in trembling fingers. Wide eyes stared without seeing into the winding tangle of the forest.

  
Lance's gaze followed the slow trickle of dark blood running down Shiro's metallic arm. At least he had stopped harming himself for now, but what had he been trying to do? Remove the arm? Surely not. Surely he must realise it wasn't as simple as that.

  
In his right mind, yes. But not now, not when he barely knew what was real and what was a figment of his haunted imagination.

  
Lance tried again, bracing himself for the other paladin to try to strike him for a second time. "Shiro. It's me. Please put the knife down." Damn, his voice was shaking so hard his words were barely understandable and it wasn't exactly easy to appear a steady and reassuring presence when he could barely stay on his feet. He gripped a tree trunk with one hand, wiped his mouth with the other, and managed a wobbly step forward. Beneath it all - the uncertainty and disbelief and churning terror - he had a disturbing urge to laugh. What a mess they both were. Allura would knock their heads together if she were here.

  
But Allura was not here, and he had to deal with this on his own.

  
"Shiro," he said again, softly, soothingly. "Please put the knife down."

  
Where had he even got that knife? Lance hadn't been aware he carried one. Then again, Keith somehow wore enough blades beneath his tight-fitting clothes that it was a wonder he didn't look like a pincushion. It didn't take much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that Shiro did the same - not with his past experiences. The experiences that right now were trapped behind his tortured eyes.

  
Shiro didn't respond for several seconds, but when Lance took a step forward, he flinched violently and in turn Lance froze, heart pounding.

  
"Don't come any closer." The words left Shiro's mouth in a rush of air, a single exhalation. He looked at him, met his eyes, then stared into the forest again.

  
Slowly, Lance raised his arms in a placating gesture, and stepped back slightly. "I won't. I promise. Just please... please put the knife down."

  
Something in his tone must have broken through the shield Shiro had pulled up around himself, because his blank stare flickered and, just for a moment, life returned to his eyes. His hand opened, fingers trembling as if protesting every movement, and the blade clattered to the ground.

  
Lance had to fiercely push back the urge to leap forward, grab the knife and pull it safely out of reach. He exhaled, clenching his fists by his sides. "Thank you."

  
Shiro's hand returned to its previous position, his arms pressed even more tightly around his body. The blood from his shredded right bicep covered everything. A smear of crimson mirrored the horizontal scar across the bridge of his nose, giving his sharp features a sense of feral intensity.

  
"We need to bind those cuts," Lance said quietly, when it became apparent that Shiro didn't intend to speak again. How strange to think that everything had been switched around. Just a few hours earlier it would have been their leader watching out for him like a concerned parent, just as he did with all the paladins. Always watching their backs, ensuring their safety and happiness, but not above giving a lecture when it was needed. _"Hunk, good job today, but don't work yourself too hard. Keith, please try and join us for meals on occasions, it would be nice to actually see your face from time to time. Pidge, you need to start getting some earlier nights, fixing Rover can wait. Lance, watch your language!"_

  
Now, silence was the only response to Lance's words, and the perpetual calmness that usually cloaked the other man had been all but erased. For the first time, a sliver of ice began to dig its way into Lance's core, a genuine fear that maybe he would never find the real Shiro again beneath it. Firmly, he pushed that fear away, tried to fill his heart with fire. Heat and flame and pure reckless determination, like the wild strength that Keith possessed. Perhaps the Red Paladin was dead. Perhaps he was lost, struggling to find his way back to them. But whatever happened, Lance knew that Keith would want him to drag Shiro from the depths he had sunk into, come hell or high water, no matter what it took.

  
He took one step forward, then another, and Shiro stared up at him with a fear that would be more at home on the face of a child who had lost its parent. His voice was rough, a broken rasp.

  
"You promised! You promised not to come any closer!"

  
Above all else, that was what Shiro was most concerned about? A dumb promise? Lance would have laughed blackly if he had the energy. He might have also cried, if he hadn't shoved all his outward emotions into a box, only to be opened when this was over and done with.

  
He ignored Shiro's protests, kneeling down next to him and unzipping his own paladin uniform to reach for the hem of his shirt beneath. Shiro looked as if he wanted to reach out, and Lance pushed back an urge to flinch, but then the older man's hands clenched tightly and he pulled them into himself as if he was afraid Lance might shatter if he touched him. With a painful jolt in his chest, Lance realised that that was probably the case. Shiro was too frightened to touch him. He didn't trust himself. Those hands, just thirty minutes earlier, had been wrapped around Lance's neck.

  
The younger paladin grabbed the hem of his shirt and tore a strip from it, gritting his teeth with the effort. It was a lot more difficult than it looked in the movies. Then again, he didn't exactly cut the most muscular figure, he thought with a grimace.

  
When he began to clumsily bind the cuts in Shiro's arm, the other man stared at him as if he had grown two heads.

  
"What are you doing?"

  
"What do you think I'm doing?" Lance muttered, tongue sticking from the corner of his mouth as he finished off a knot. The cloth was saturated within seconds, but it would have to do for now. If he pulled any more of his shirt to shreds it would end up as a crop top. Maybe he'd look good in a crop top. Who knew?

  
"You need to take it off."

  
It took several seconds for Shiro's words to filter through, and when they did, Lance frowned.

  
"What?"

  
"Take it off."

  
Lance looked blankly down at himself. "My shirt?"

  
Shiro let out a noise that might have been a laugh under different circumstances - if it didn't sound closer to a sob. "No. My _arm."_

  
"What-" Lance began, his gaze flicking from the Galra tech to the other paladin's face. He tried again. "What are you talking about? What do you mean?"

  
Shiro lifted his left hand, a bloodstained and very real hand, and jabbed his fingertip into the side of his head. "They're in _here_ , Lance. The Galra. As long as that thing is attached to me, my mind is not my own."

  
His voice was rough and grim and his gaze more lucid than it had been for hours. He trembled, and swallowed, and looked away again. Lance didn't know what to say.

  
"I can't."

  
"What do you think I was doing with _that?"_ Shiro demanded, pointing at the crimson-stained knife on the ground; Lance flinched, ready to act should he attempt to grab it again. "I nearly killed you."

  
Silence for several long seconds. When Lance spoke again, his voice came out in a whisper.

  
"That wasn't you. And you stopped. You regained control."

  
"And what about next time? What then?"

  
Lance didn't have an answer to that. He wanted to say "There won't be a next time." But how could he promise that? How could anyone? Instead, he said simply, "I trust you."

  
A single tear tracked its way down Shiro's scarred cheek. "Your trust is very badly placed."

  
"Of course it's not. You're the Black Paladin. The head of Voltron. We'll follow you wherever you go."

  
Shiro exhaled a long and shaky breath. "I'm not the Black Paladin."

  
Lance frowned again. "Of course you are."

  
"No. I'm not. I'm nothing but a fraud. That's why I don't have the bayard. That's why Black broke her bond with me during our fight with Zarkon. I was never meant to be the Black Paladin."

  
Lance stared at him. "I don't understand."

  
"Zarkon is the Black Paladin." Shiro spat the words as if they made him feel sick. The silence stretched taut, broken only by the chirping of insects and the whispering breeze through the forest.

  
"How..." Lance began. He spread his hands, gestures replacing the words he could not summon. "That doesn't make any sense. The previous paladins died ten thousand years ago."

  
"You know that Zarkon lived then. He destroyed Altea. He might have kept himself alive through a constance cycle of quintessence... I don't know." Shiro scrubbed his face with his hand, leaving a trail of blood across his cheek. He sounded exhausted, as if he had aged twenty years in as many minutes. "What matters is that he was the leader of Voltron, and he betrayed Alfor but he never _stopped_ being the Black Paladin whether he had the lion or not."

  
Lance opened his mouth, but once again he didn't have an answer, and he slowly shut it again.

  
"I was never meant to enter the equation," Shiro said quietly. "I doubt they ever suspected their own prisoner would end up being the one to pilot the Black Lion. But we never truly connected."

  
"Of course you did!" Lance protested hotly. "You were the first to learn to control your lion, when we were doing those training exercises! The rest of us just crashed into the ground!"

  
"That's because I'm a Garrison pilot."

  
"So were we!"

  
"You were cadets. I was a graduate. My skill with Black has nothing to do with some natural affinity with the lion," Shiro said, a rare hint of scorn slipping into his voice. Lance felt his heart sinking toward his stomach, the reasonings he had felt were so strong crumbling to dust in front of him.

  
Slowly, his hands clenched in his lap. No. Perhaps Shiro was right, but that didn't mean they had to roll over and give up. What had happened in the past did not have to define their future.

  
"Maybe you need to earn Black's trust," he said slowly.

  
Shiro stared at him. "What?"

  
"The same way that Keith had to earn Red's respect. Just because it's not easy doesn't mean it's not possible. You've flown Black before - if she didn't want to give you a chance, she wouldn't. It's not as if having the bayard is a requirement to be the paladin. And besides, Zarkon forfeited the right to be the Black Paladin when he destroyed Altea. _You_ are the Black Paladin and there's nothing he can do about it." He felt his voice growing in strength as he spoke, and he was rewarded with a slight widening of Shiro's eyes.

  
"Even if you're right..." the older man murmured after a moment, turning away from Lance to look toward his dirt-marred boots, "there is something he can do. He's doing it right now. He's inside my head - him, or Haggar, or whoever it is." Lance hadn't missed the shudder that ran through Shiro's frame at the second name. He fell silent for a moment, then he whispered, "What if he's watching us right now? Looking through my eyes?"

  
"I don't-" Lance began, but Shiro interrupted him.

  
"That's why you need to take this off," he hissed, the glassy blankness of earlier falling back over his gaze. He jabbed at his Galra arm with the fingers of his other hand, and Lance stared mutely at him. He was losing him again, and he had to catch him before he plunged back to the depths. "As long as this remains a part of me, I remain a part of the Galra."

  
Lance struggled for words. "I - I can't just-"

  
"It's the only option," Shiro snapped. The deep crimson blood across his face contrasted starkly against the shock of white that marred his otherwise dark hair. "It's the only thing we can do to ensure your safety until you can return to the castle."

  
"Until I... what? I don't understand. You'll be coming back too..." Lance trailed off. Something deep in the back of his mind told him that he understood perfectly. The forest was as calm and still as ever around him, but inside, his world was tearing apart at the seams.

  
Shiro didn't respond for several seconds. His breaths were sharp and shallow as if he had been running - fleeing for his life from an invisible and intangible foe. The words that fell from his lips were like knife blades slicing through the dark.

  
"I'm dying."

  
"No." Lance didn't remember opening his mouth, but the word tumbled into empty darkness anyway.

  
Shiro pressed on, as he always did, the ever-present voice of authority but this time there was no positive message, no calm reassurance that everything would be alright. Lance has the distinct sensation that he was falling.

  
"I've got days. Hours, maybe. I won't make it back. And if you stay here with me any longer, the Galra will ensure you don't either."


	9. Recollection

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT Feb 2017: I've made some changes to this chapter because there were parts I was really happy with and parts I really wasn't. I was struggling to maintain a balance between displaying the real Shiro and the facade he displays at work, further complicated with the fact that this chapter is from Keith's POV so it's coloured with his (not so flattering) opinion. I hope it turned out OK!
> 
> This is a flashback scene but I received feedback that formatting it in italics made it uncomfortable to read so I changed it back.
> 
> Thanks as always for reading and please let me know what you think!

The cratered shape of a nearby moon loomed large beyond the window. Further away, the cloudy jewel-toned ribbon of the Milky Way curved out of sight, cutting a vivid streak across black space. It was beautiful, stunningly convincing for all that it was simply a screen. If he didn't have the small issue of a training simulation to complete, Keith could have looked at it for hours. Not that he didn't already spend enough time sitting on the Garrison's roof after curfew searching for constellations.

  
The murmuring and laughter of his fellow cadets drifted his way as three of them entered the simulation cockpit after him and took their places. Keith gritted his teeth and sat down in the pilot's seat. If he had his way, he'd complete these test runs by himself. The last thing he wanted was the distraction of a chorus of voices shouting in his ear the entire time. Keith had never managed to find his place with his fellow students, always hovering on the sidelines, a million thoughts running through his head but never making it out of his mouth. He didn't think he was better than them. He just didn't want to guage their success against his own. Keith was more than capable of judging his own abilities and failures, and it riled him that his teamwork skills were expected to tell him what he was worth.

  
"Hey. How's it going?"

  
He jumped and turned in the pilot's chair to see he and the other students had been joined in the cockpit by another man who was now leaning over the control panel checking one of the screens. Not a cadet. His uniform was deep grey accented with gold embroidery mimicking the shape of wings. Small text emblazoned above the pocket on the left-hand side of the jacket read T. SHIROGANE.

  
Not just a graduate either, apparently. The only time Keith had seen that face before, it had been on national news. The Galaxy Garrison's most lauded pilot, their favourite poster boy.

  
However pleasant the smile, Keith's immediate and instictive response was a deep and stirring sense of dislike. They could not be more different, any further away from one another on the scale of model recruits.

  
And just what was he doing in an entry-level exploration simulator?

  
It took a moment for Keith to realise that he was expected to respond to the other man's question. "It's... OK, thanks." He plucked absently at the sleeve of his own uniform. Garish orange with yellow trim. It was hideous. He wondered vaguely if it was a deliberate decision by the Garrison to give their cadets even more incentive to progress quickly. Personally, he thought he would have looked better in a darker colour. Red, perhaps.

  
"Good." The other man checked a few controls and, satisfied, stood back again. Keith studied him absently from the corner of his eye. He must have been mid-twenties at the earliest, perhaps closer to thirty. Black hair was shaved into an undercut with a longer fringe falling across sharp features and slate-grey eyes.

  
Keith had never had any interest in forming romantic relationships with others - he had enough trouble just trying to maintain friendships - but that didn't mean he couldn't appreciate an attractive person when he saw one and this was definitely one of those moments. However, ultimately, the second word that came to mind when looking at Shirogane was 'bland'. It was to be expected. The Garrison pulled recruits apart and put them back together into perfect cookie-cutter pilots. Shirogane was just an exemplary example of one of these. Extraordinary abilities forced into a shape the general public would fawn over.

  
"I'm Takashi," he continued after a moment. "Well, most people call me Shiro so whatever's easiest for you. I've just kind of started replying to anything." He made a face, quirking up one dark eyebrow with an expression of amused exasperation.

  
"Oh," Keith replied flatly, turning his attention back to the controls.

  
"This... is the point where you introduce yourself," Shiro prompted gently when it became apparent that Keith did not intend to continue.

  
"Oh," Keith said again, then added belatedly, "I'm Keith. Keith Kogane." The surname had been given to him by one of his many foster parents; he didn't know where his first name had come from. His childhood was a blur of paperwork and unfamiliar faces and a new home every few months.

  
"OK," Shiro said slowly. Keith squirmed slightly beneath his gaze and the older man looked away again to study the cockpit. Perhaps he had realised how uncomfortable Keith felt and was taking pity on him. At least he hadn't expected him to shake hands. Keith really hated shaking hands. "Well, it's nice to meet you, Keith. I'm going to be in charge of this simulation exercise today since your original instructor has been called away for work elsewhere."

  
Keith raised an eyebrow. Takashi Shirogane, celebrated pilot and perhaps the Garrison's biggest success story to date, just happened to be the only person around to take over a bog-standard simulation exercise?

  
"If I'm honest, I have no idea what I'm doing," Shiro added in a surreptitious whisper.

  
Keith looked up at him in surprise, and Shiro winked.

  
"You seem like the kind of guy who won't go running off and telling."

  
"No. I'm not." Keith wasn't sure if that statement had required an answer, but he gave one anyway. He would play along, if it meant ending this entire conversation more quickly.

  
Shiro barked a laugh and gave him a pat on the shoulder that almost sent him face-first into the controls. He was half a foot taller than the younger man and significantly broader; it didn't seem to matter how diligently Keith visited the gym, he perpetually looked like a scrawny thirteen-year-old. "Good man. OK, I better get started and get this lot into order." He gestured toward the other cadets, who were lounging in their various positions around the cockpit laughing and catcalling. "Wish me luck."

  
"Good luck," Keith muttered without enthusiasm, but Shiro seemed to happily accept the statement all the same.

 

******

 

Keith's days continued for the next week much as they had done for the last two years; waking up in his simple bed in a shared dorm with three others who had long given up attempting to draw him into conversation, eating breakfast by himself in the utilitarian canteen, sitting at the back in lectures scribbling lengthy notes in his scrawled handwriting and then heading back for dinner and bed. Rinse and repeat. He didn't mind the monotony - even this far into his time at the Garrison, a routine was still something of a novelty after sixteen years of being passed from orphanage to foster home and back again. His age was an estimate, since he had been found as a baby with no indication of where he had come from or the reason for his abadonment. Similarly, his birthday was a randomly-chosen date, but he didn't mind. It wasn't as if there was anyone to give him cards and presents. And he had never liked cake.

  
He hadn't seen any sign of Shiro since the simulation exercise - in which the older man had proven, despite admitting that he had no idea what he was doing, to be a perfectly good teacher - so it was a surprise to see him in an early Monday morning lecture a week later. He was sitting at the side of the hall with a clipboard in his lap, chatting animatedly with another graduate to his left. Keith followed his bleary-eyed classmates to the desks and took his usual seat at the back, pulling his notebook from his bag as he looked toward the other man with some curiosity. After several minutes, Shiro spotted him and gave him a cheerful grin. Keith met his gaze, and then looked back at his notebook.

  
He didn't know what to make of Shiro. Undeniably - and he was reluctant to admit to it - he had received a sense of sincerity from the older man where it was absent in most others he'd encountered at the Garrison. Shiro had been full of praise for Keith's piloting abilities - not without a hint of concern for his complete lack of interest in working as part of a team, but it was better than the response Keith had received from the majority of his instructors. He felt, somehow, that Shiro's words were genuine, even while alarm bells rang somewhere in the back of his mind at the other man's presence.

  
Keith's mind wandered as the lecture went on, trying to recall the topic of the Garrison's latest press conference. Absently, he began to tap his pen tip on the surface of the desk, until a glare from the girl in front of him made him realise what he was doing and he quickly stopped. Beyond the scowling face of his fellow student, movement caught his eye; Shiro was jotting down notes and occasionally conferring with the man beside him, his foot jiggling up and down the entire time. Keith scowled. An irritating habit, and very distracting. He better not do it for the whole morning.

  
Unfortunately, Shiro persisted with the foot-jiggling for the next two hours and Keith eventually found himself staring at a page of illegible scribbles in place of notes due to his complete inability to concentrate. He wanted to grab that stupid foot and break it. That would wipe the self-satisfied smile off perfect Takashi Shirogane's face-

  
"Kogane."

  
Keith froze.

  
"Kogane, I assume that since you're engrossed enough in your papers to completely ignore my questions, you believe you know enough of this subject to skip the entire lecture. Is that correct?"

  
Slowly, he lifted his gaze from his desk, past those of his staring fellow students and up to the lecturer who had him pinned with a hawk-like glare. Finding himself the sudden focus of so much intense scrutiny from all angles was like staring into a bright light. He just wanted to meld into the shadows at the back of the room and make everyone forget he existed.

  
"No, sir," he muttered, voice barely audible between lips that hardly moved.

  
"Good. You show promise, cadet. Don't let your focus slip."

  
Keith's fingers clenched more tightly around his pen as the lecturer turned his attention back to the enormous screens behind him. There was truth in those words, but no sincerity. Keith had come to learn in his time at the Garrison that the two were not mutually exclusive. Positive affirmations would nudge him in the right direction to a certain degree, but after that point, everyone seemed to instinctively understand there was a point he would not be pushed past. That was the point at where they could happily throw their hands up, proclaim that they tried their best, and pass him onto the next unfortunate victim.

  
It was not a lie - Keith was a talented pilot. But he would not succeed. He would not graduate a perfect shining example of everything the Galaxy Garrison represented. He knew that, however much he tried to deny it to himself, and the knowledge sat there like a stone in his gut. He could see it in the glances that pierced his back in the corridor but slid past like tyres on an oil slick when he turned around; he could see it in the flicker of disappointment in his instructors' eyes whenever his patience snapped and he yelled at his fellow cadets midway through a simulation or simply walked out.

  
Deep in Keith's belly a flame had begun to build when he first started his life at the Garrison. It had flickered into existence at the first sideways glance, the first realisation that the expressions of the other cadets changed when they learned of his past, realised they had been surpassed by someone who had apparently appeared from nowhere with a blank slate for a history and a bad attitude. He knew he didn't fit, but he didn't know how to reshape himself in order to do so - and it didn't take him long to realise that he didn't want to fit. He wanted to succeed, regardless of how far from the crowd it left him standing. But it wasn't going to be easy. The spark in him built over the years, and every snide remark and bitter glare added fuel to the fire. Occasionally, it broke its boundaries, burst from his skin in spikes of rage and his mouth in cruel words like solar bursts from the surface of the sun. And then it cooled, just enough for him to maintain a calm facade over the constant simmering rage.

  
Until next time. Until he reached the goal that was just beyond his reach. Somewhere beneath that flame was the knowledge that he probably wouldn't make it, and he pushed it down with all his strength.

  
His lecturer's words had probably made things worse, at least temporarily. He would be on the receiving end of jibes and cold glares from the cadets he shared his dorm with for the next few days, with a reason to recall how much they envied him handed to them on a plate. A cracking sound split the air, and Keith found himself looking in surprise at the two broken pen halves in his hands.

  
He remained silent until the lecture was over, when he stood and left the room before the tide of students could crash over him. He'd cry off sick and skip lunch. He didn't feel like eating anyway - he rarely did.

  
The sound of brisk footsteps approaching behind caused his chest to tighten even as his expression shifted into a scowl. He walked faster, past locked doorways, gatherings of students and uniformed staff without a backward glance. Several turns and a downward staircase later, he was convinced he'd managed to lose his pursuer, until a voice made him freeze with his key halfway to the door of his dorm.

  
"Keith! Wait."

  
For a moment Keith was tempted to wrench the door open, slip through, slam it shut and wait until the other man left; but not only would that make Shiro's opinion of him sink any lower, he also had the distinct impression that he was not a man to give up easily.

  
He paused, lowering his hand to his side again, gaze focused on the student names listed beside the door. Why did he care where he stood in Shiro's estimation? He had just power-walked half a mile through the Garrison's corridors to get away from him, for pity's sake.

  
"Keith, I'd like to speak to you for a minute."

  
It was not a request. Those were the words of a man who was used to getting what he wanted. Keith's fingers tightened again on his keys and with a will of iron he turned away from the door to face the taller figure who approached him from down the corridor. The distant clatter of cutlery and murmur of voices from somewhere on the floor above told him that the midday meal had been served; the only others in the utilitarian grey-walled corridor were his fellow stragglers. They glanced his way with unabashed curiosity, but a curt look from Shiro soon sent them on their way.

  
"Can I help you, sir?" Keith asked, managing to keep his tone cool and even, a lid on the simmering flame underneath.

  
A hint of exasperation flickered across Shiro's face before he schooled his expression back to neutrality. "There's no need for that. Just call me Shiro."

  
Keith had a feeling the words were intended to help him relax, but his suspicions only grew. There was no good reason for him to be instructed to refer to one of the Garrison's most decorated pilots in such a familiar manner. But he wasn't going to say anything. He just wanted him to go away. Stiffly, he managed a nod.

  
"Good." Shiro absently ran a hand through his unruly fringe, leaving it sticking up at an odd angle. "I was planning to speak to you before lunch, but I guess you weren't planning on heading there anyway."

  
Obviously. "I hate mac and cheese."

  
It was a feeble excuse and Shiro clearly knew it, but he managed to hold back the expression of exasperation this time. Or perhaps the previous lapse in his cool facade had just been a careful orchestration. "Oh, really? I always enjoyed it. Kind of tastes like homemade."

  
Keith felt his eyebrows sliding up towards his hairline. "I don't want to know what they make mac and cheese with at your house."

  
Shiro laughed softly, folding his arms as he leant against the wall. "Ah, well, everyone's different I suppose. Speaking of which, I wanted to talk to you about your future plans."

  
Keith's eyebrows, which had returned to their normal position, immediately shot back up again. "Future plans? Are we talking marriage, two-point-four kids, a house in the countryside?"

  
"No." Shiro laughed again. Keith didn't. "I worded that badly. I meant your intentions within the Garrison."

  
"To become a fighter pilot." The answer was immediate. It had been sitting on his tongue since he was sixteen years old - or thereabouts. For all he knew he could just have a baby face and be ten years older than his classmates.

  
Shiro's expression sobered, and he unfolded his arms, shifted away from the wall and then folded them again as he didn't quite know what to do with himself. Either he wasn't sure how to approach this conversation or he was a very good actor. Keith knew which side his suspicions lingered on. "Keith, I understand that you've been having some... troubles, in your studies. Especially within simulations with your fellow cadets. Teamwork is an issue - and if you intend to become a pilot, especially in combat situations, teamwork is essential. It's not an option. If you can't accept that, you need to go."

  
His tone had changed as he spoke, the endearing hesitance falling away to reveal a hardness beneath. The unwavering confidence of a born leader, a figure Keith would never be. He felt his hackles rise, and only realised he had clenched his fist when the metal of his keys bit into his palm.

  
"I understand that, sir," he replied through gritted teeth, before correcting himself. "Shiro." Faintly, recollections of the basic language studies he'd taken in his early years at the Garrison drifted back to him. Shiro. White. Unblemished and pure. Just like the reputation this shining graduate carried on his shoulders. Keith's lip curled.

  
Shiro exhaled slowly. "I'm not sure you do understand how much you're jeapordising your own career."

  
That stung, and an angry spike of flame leapt out from the fire in Keith's belly. He reined it in with some difficulty. "I do understand. I'm... working on it."

  
"From what I've heard in talks with your instructors, you don't seem to be doing that."

  
"I knew it! You _have_ been spying on me!" The words tumbled out before he could stop them, and his jaw snapped shut so hard that his teeth audibly hit together.

  
Shiro raised an eyebrow. "Spying? No. Concerned, yes."

  
"I don't need your concerns. You can keep them to yourself." And there was another outburst to add to the rapidly growing list of things he really should have thought about before he said them.

  
Shiro watched him for a moment, and Keith fought the urge to apologise in an automatic response to the disappointment in his eyes. He had been through this routine many times before: frustration, outburst, falsified concern from his instructors, followed by his insincere apology and a return to the beginning of the cycle. Rinse and repeat. But something about this was different, and he didn't like it. Something about Shiro got beneath his skin and made him simultaneously want to beg for every scrap of knowledge he could give him, crawl away in shame, and smack him in the face. His brain was a mess, and it took several moments for it all to click into place.

  
Envy. Plain and simple.

  
Keith felt his face turning hot with shame even as his stomach roiled with a familiar burning sensation, roaring to be let out. His words had fallen from his lips like barbs, forcing Shiro away from him, insisting that they were nothing alike and never would be. But deep down, beneath the anger and the bitterness, somewhere amid the fire in his gut and the stone-cold knowledge that he was a born failure, he wanted to be the next Takashi Shirogane.

  
Damn, there was a lot going on in there. No wonder his mind was always running at a million miles an hour.

  
There was silence between the two of them for a moment. Then, slowly, Shiro exhaled.

  
"I want to help you."

  
"I know. I figured that out when you appeared in my Neptune simulation with some bullshit excuse about instructor illness," Keith snapped. Manners had long since gone out the window; he would probably be dismissed from the Garrison by the time this conversation was over, anyway. Shiro held all the cards here. "I'm not some little project for you to take on. I don't care if you're at a loose end in between smiling for the cameras. Maybe the exploration jobs have dried up, I don't know. But whatever reason you're following me like some sort of creep, you can quit it, because I don't need you."

  
He swung round and made to unlock the door of his dorm, but the rage sweeping through his made his hand shake so much he missed the keyhole. In the time it took for him to regain control of himself, Shiro had reached across the gap between them to grip his shoulder.

  
"Keith. Listen to me."

  
"Don't touch me." If there was one thing Keith hated it was people getting in his personal space without permission, and this deceptively gentle touch that he knew could turn iron-hard in an instant was definitely crossing the line.

  
The hand fell away, but he still persisted. "I don't see you as a project. I shouldn't have said that I wanted to help you."

  
"Oscar-worthy acting, but you can drop it," Keith snarled. "You had a little plan in place all along, I know it. You had me figured out as some sort of hot-tempered idiot without so much as two brain cells to rub together, too stupid to see what was right in front of me."

  
A smile tugged at the corner of Shiro's mouth. "Well, if the cap fits."

  
Keith's jaw dropped. He fought for words, but nothing came, and Shiro saw his chance to fill the gap.

  
"I'm offering you an opportunity. It's clear to everyone here that you haven't had the best start in life, and maybe that's what's affected your behaviour here at the Garrison. You have talent, and it's not being employed effectively." He paused, looking thoughtful. "Contrary to what you seem to think, I don't have a sudden interest in assisting struggling cadets. As much as I'd like to, I don't have the time. The phrase 'loose end' is not in my vocabulary. I'm actually on two-week leave right now, and my superiors asked me here to-"

  
"To brainwash me," Keith snarled. "To pull me into pieces and put me back together in a perfect carbon copy of you. That's right, isn't it?"

  
"No." There was a nerve twitching in Shiro's neck; his patience had started to approach its limit. "I want to-"

  
"You want, you want, you want. Well, let me break some news to you, buddy - you don't always get what you want. Not even the Galaxy Garrison's precious favourite gets what he wants all the time. I'm not your project - I'm not here for you to force into your little clone and then bask in your own glory at how you managed to turn my life around." Keith jabbed a finger at Shiro when he opened his mouth to interrupt. "And for the record, my past is nothing to do with you. I'm not broken or damaged just because I don't know where I came from. I can build from the ground up, and I can do it without your help."

  
He turned and shoved the door open, hardly seeing anything beyond it. The world was a blur, his rage a palpable thing that smothered his vision and made his words burn in his throat. Deep in his stomach, the fire roared.

  
"Keith, just listen to me-"

  
A hand on his shoulder again. The fire swelled and he could have sworn he heard its crackle in his ears, drowning out everything else. His skin was burning, too tight; he was angry, and he wanted out. With a wordless yell Keith swung round and brought his fist up to strike Shiro in the face.

  
A sharp smack reverberated from the corridor walls as skin met skin. Deep violet eyes met cool grey. Slowly, Shiro pushed Keith's hand down with the same ease that he had used to bring it to a complete stop an inch from his face. That stupid smug face that Keith wanted to beat black and blue because they were not the same and they would never be the same. He would not be moulded into something he was not, no matter how much his treacherous mind wanted to leave this feeble existence behind and become someone, something else. He burned with the agony of what he was and what he would always be.

  
There was silence for ten long seconds. Keith counted them, waiting, wanting Shiro to be the one to break the quiet and bring the guillotine down. His breaths were loud and harsh in his ears, the fire swirling in his stomach like a caged beast.

  
Finally, Shiro spoke, his voice at once perfectly soft and utterly glacial. "I didn't want to have to do this."

  
"Then don't."

  
Shiro exhaled slowly, and pushed the younger man's hand away. Keith let it drop. His heartbeat swamped him, deafening in his ears; the fire had fallen back, dwindling, flickering in the cold and undeniable knowledge of what he had done.

  
"I can't leave behaviour like this unpunished, Keith."

  
"You provoked me." Keith's voice shook so much he could barely force the words out.

  
Shiro stared at him. "I would never try to provoke you into assaulting a superior. Why the hell would I do that?"

  
"Because - because you want me out." He was losing control, but there was nothing he could do to grasp it back. It would be no use pleading for Shiro to keep this to himself even if he could bring himself to - there was CCTV everywhere in the compound. "I won't accept your help so Iverson wants me out of the way to protect the Garrison's precious reputation. You just needed an excuse for it."

  
Shiro let out a long sigh and ran a hand through his hair. "I can see how you'd get to that conclusion, Keith, but the entire world isn't out to get you. I genuinely want to help you reach your potential and... I'm going about this all in the wrong way."

  
"Oh, you think?"

  
Shiro raised an eyebrow, and somehow Keith knew he had been expecting that response. "OK. Let's see. We have two options here. One, I have to report to my superiors that you attempted to assault me, and we'll see where they take things from there."

  
Keith tried to throw out another smart response, but his words seemed to have shrivelled up somewhere in his throat.

  
"Or, option two," Shiro continued. "I plead your case with the higher-ups, insist that you're not a lost cause and that working with me and my team may a better solution. It's hard work." He barked out a humourless laugh and grimaced. "It's one hell of an understatement to say it's hard work. So in effect, you wouldn't remain unpunished, which would be enough to satisfy Iverson - and it works out for all of us in the long run."

  
_Of course. Of course it all works out for you, the Garrison's shining star._

  
Keith didn't speak for a moment. He stepped back, the doorway behind him, familiar and beckoning. But running inside and locking the door would not solve this mess. Not this time.

  
"You're an arrogant self-satisfied piece of shit."

  
Shiro shrugged. "Eh, I've been called worse. So what's your answer?"

  
Keith's gaze swept the floor restlessly before returning to meet Shiro's eyes. He inhaled, exhaled, then snapped, "Fine. I'll accept your help."

  
"Good." Shiro folded his arms and leant against the wall again, resuming his earlier position as if this entire conversation hadn't happened. As if he hadn't just threatened Keith's entire career as flippantly as if he was discussing a friendly hoverbike race in the yards outside. "Oh, and I didn't mention the other reason I've been instructed to keep an eye on your progress."

  
Keith stared at him. "What other reason?"

  
Shiro met his eyes again, and his expression was impossible to read. A pause, and then one word fell from his lips to fill the space between them.

  
"Kerberos."


	10. Kerberos

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT Feb 2017: Made some changes because I wasn't happy with the characterisation!
> 
> Please be aware that most of this will be wildly inaccurate to how an organisation such as the Garrison would run if it existed in real life, simply for the sake of the story! I know the whole idea of Keith graduating early is crazy, but the series is about giant flying robot lions, so hopefully you can let me off :P

The steady beeping of the alarm clock forced its way through a blanketing layer of dreams and ascended into a piercing shriek that left Keith swearing and scrambling out of the bedcovers to switch it off. The world tilted for a moment, his sleep-fogged mind attempting to work out which way was up, while he sat with the clock in his hands staring blearily at the flashing numbers. 6:30am. The same time he always woke up. The same routine of pulling on the same cadet uniform and following his fellow students to the mess hall for the same breakfast as always. But after that, the routine was shattered.

  
Kerberos. He still didn't understand it.

  
Keith's gaze drifted toward the galactic map pinned to the wall beside his bunk. He had amassed a decent collection of newspaper cuttings, pages sneakily torn from library books and other papers or images that happened to catch his eye, which could be anything from instruction manuals to old black-and-white photographs. He had taken the top bunk, and the effort of climbing a ladder usually put his dorm mates off the idea of rearranging his belongings for a laugh - or it could have been the fact that the last time one of them had tried that, Keith had thrown a hardback book at his face and then convinced him to tell their instructors that he had tripped on the stairs. Keith still wasn't sure how the other student - Ashton or something, he didn't really care to remember - had been persuaded that easily, though he had heard him later telling a gathering of other cadets some ridiculous story about Keith's eyes glowing yellow or some other nonsense. Keith hadn't stuck around to find out what other tales might spin off from that story. Ashton had clearly snuck alcohol into the dorms again, and judging by the expressions on the other students' faces, they were of no doubt that he'd been enjoying a little too much as well.

  
Keith leant his elbows on his knees to study the poster on the wall, his gaze tracing the orbits of the Solar System's planets before extending beyond it. Kerberos was just a dot hovering beside its parent planet, Pluto. A small, fuzzy dot, elongated into an oblong by the movement of the voyager craft while it captured its long-exposure image. It was difficult to comprehend that something so apparently insignificant represented the next step in human advancement into unknown space.

  
He had no idea how he felt. It was difficult to untangle the knot of emotions that had buried themselves beneath a facade of uncaring neutrality - the facade he had shown to Shiro when he had explained the intricacies of the mission.

  
Along with Samuel Holt, a biologist with years of experience behind him, and his son Matt, Shiro would be heading to Kerberos to collect ice samples and investigate the structure and environment of its surface - or something like that. Keith wasn't particularly interested. He wasn't a scientist. But he was interested in what it could mean for future space travel developments. Kerberos would be the furthest from Earth that any human had ever travelled - only probes had reached such distant depths of space before. And Shiro wanted Keith to join their training regime, to potentially, eventually, join them.

  
The task was, in principle, simple - on Keith's end, at least. He would be a spare, nothing more, but essential nonetheless should the unthinkable happen. As Shiro pointed out, a high-risk mission into the unknown with only one pilot was borderline absurd. Even Earth-bound craft required a co-pilot. The Garrison had been attempting for some time to find a second to accompany the group, but had been unsuccessful due to lack of availability and the fact that those who did possess the necessary skills were not willing to take such a risk or stay away from their family for such a long time. And then Shiro had heard about Keith.

  
Keith's lip curled as he thought about it. Of course. He fit the mould perfectly. A skilled pilot with no comprehension of risk and nothing to tie him to Earth. No family to watch the news every night anxiously waiting to hear of the mission's success. No friends to miss his company while he drifted in the black depths of space.

  
This was all in theory, of course. There were dozens - perhaps hundreds - of tests Keith would need to pass to prove he was worthy of accompanying the three on this mammoth task. He had no experience in anything beyond a few dozen simulations and a couple of test flights, for pity's sake. But he was expendable. That was easy enough to see. No one required his presence back at the Garrison - he was talented, but ultimately, difficult to the point where most who worked with him were well aware that he would not graduate. There was no point in him remaining here. They might as well shoot him off out of orbit, wipe their hands of him and claim that they had tried their best.

  
Keith knew that if he didn't succeed under Shiro's training, then it would reflect badly on both of them. This was Keith's last-chance saloon, and an enormous risk on Shiro's part. He had put his faith into an a cadet known for little more than his anger issues. If Keith didn't make it through training, or even worse, if he was given a place in the mission and then something went horribly wrong, it would be his career down the pan along with any hope Keith had of making a success of himself. If they all survived at all.

  
Keith was still belatedly struggling to get his head around the entire idea of the events he had instigated. He felt as if he had pushed over a domino that was just the first in a long line trailing out of sight and into the unknown. Just recalling the events of a week ago made his fists clench so tightly his nails dug painfully into his palms. No matter how incredible the opportunity that Shiro had presented to him, he had forced him into it, and it would take Keith a long time to forgive him for that - if he ever did. Shiro was a man used to getting exactly what he wanted, and he had managed it once again. The helplessness felt like a physical thing, a tight ball in his chest that blocked any potential thrill the thought of the mission could bring.

  
Suppressing a sigh, Keith leapt down from his bunk and headed for the showers while his dorm mates were still stirring. There would be plenty of time for them to fire questions and barbed accusations at him later once the rumours started travelling around of where he was headed instead of his lectures. However little they knew now, he wasn't going to give them the opportunity to start any trouble before he'd even left.

  
The corridors were already busy when he strode toward the simulation chambers at the back of the compound. A few curious glances slid over him, but he ignored them. He didn't do small talk at the best of times, but now especially he didn't feel like discussing where he was heading and why - mostly because he had no idea how to. Keith fidgeted with the cuffs of his cadet uniform as he walked, rolling the hem up and then pushing it down again. He had worn this uniform for two years and yet now, inexplicably, he felt itchy and uncomfortable. Suddenly vulnerable. It took ten more minutes of walking through grey corridors and scanning his Garrison ID through multiple security checks before the reason behind this sudden shift fell into place. His routine was gone. The repetitive days and nights that had blurred into one long, monotonous sequence since he started at the Garrison had suddenly been shattered, the ground pulled from beneath his feet until he found himself looking into empty black space broken only by the grainy image of a distant moon.

  
Keith's steps faltered, his breath hitching for a moment, and a graduate passing the opposite way slowed to glance toward him with apparent concern. He scowled in response, shoved his hands in his pockets and resumed his steady pace. Shiro's actions may have knocked him for six, put him off-kilter; but he would perservere. It would take more than this to shake him. The trembling fear that seized his bones would not prevail. He would make sure of that - if only to wipe that self-satisfied smile from the face of the Garrison's poster boy.

  
The simulation chamber he had been given directions to stood midway down a corridor bleached in white light, the air cool and void of all scents but the sterile tang of cleaning fluid. It looked remarkably unassuming from the outside; just a simple door with a small window that currently had a piece of paper pinned over it to hide the room beyond from prying eyes. Keith didn't know what he had been expecting. An enormous banner proclaiming 'KERBEROS', perhaps? An advertisement for the future of space travel, complete with a lavishly illustrated vista of Pluto's views and a smiling shot of Shiro? Keith let out a snort under his breath, and reached out to knock on the door.

  
"One second!" There was a pause, a thump, and a muttered curse before the door clicked open. Keith found himself looking at a man who had to be around the same age as Shiro, though distinctly shorter and more wiry with a mop of reddish-brown hair. The strip lights above glinted from the rims of his round glasses as he looked Keith up and down and then gave him a broad grin. "We've been expecting you."

  
Keith almost raised an eyebrow but suppressed the urge at the last second. Was he trying to be funny? Clad in a scruffy t-shirt and jeans and with a multitude of pens shoved in his pockets and behind his ears, this man didn't look as if he belonged at the Garrison at all. For a moment he had no idea how to respond, so he settled for, "I'm Keith."

  
"Great to meet you, Keith." Seemingly oblivious to the younger man's disinclination to offer his hand, the redhead forcefully grabbed it from Keith's side and shook it. "I'm Matt. If you're as good as Shiro's described, then that's a huge weight off my mind."

  
Well, that was a surprise. Keith wasn't sure how to reply to that, and attempted to formulate a response while extricating his hand from Matt's grip - but when his gaze drifted past the other man's shoulder and toward the sight beyond, any response died on his lips.

  
For all that the room had appeared the same as an ordinary simulation chamber from the outside, the replication of the Kerberos craft could not have been further from the sleek and narrow cockpits Keith was used to. All wires and white plating complete with stubby wings and enormous thrusters, the metallic structure rose above him until it almost touched the room's high ceiling. Its shape was significantly rounder than the fighter craft, all bulk and no beauty, and where it stood as if chopped in half as a mock-up on only the frontward chambers of the ship, Keith had the uncomfortable sense that he was about to step into a giant washing machine.

  
Amongst the chaos of control panels and screens on the right-hand side of the room, Shiro was working on a laptop, a sheaf of papers and a calculator to one side of him and a bag of crisps on the other. Keith had expected to find him in his perfectly pressed Garrison uniform again, with its immaculate golden piping and gleaming buttons, but those had been replaced with an outfit similar to Matt's: pair of faded jeans and a maroon t-shirt emblazoned with kanji. Perhaps a band or a sports team; Keith couldn't recall enough from his language studies to read it. His memory was usually fairly impressive next to his classmates, but it had its limits.

  
"Shiro, how many times do I have to tell you - no snacks in the simulation room!" Matt grumbled as he headed back to his own place on the opposite side of the room, apparently unaware that he had left Keith hovering like an awkward spare part. Shiro gave a resigned look and slid the crisp packet back underneath a jacket he had left lying on the desk; Keith had the sense he had already been warned to put them away several times.

  
"I've been here since four-thirty, Matt, in case you'd forgotten."

  
"How could I forget with your constant whining?" Matt replied without turning around, his face limned in blue light from the multitude of screens before him. Keith glanced between the two of them for a moment, considering that if they were just going to exchange insults the entire time he was here, he might as well just go back to his lectures as originally planned, but then he spotted the smile flickering around Matt's face and realised they were joking.

  
"Good to see you, Keith." Shiro got his feet, stretched and suppressed a wince as his shoulder cracked. In casual clothing he looked significantly younger than he had the last time they had spoken, and Keith found himself second-guessing his initial presumption that Shiro was in his late twenties or even early thirties. Between Shiro's faded jeans and trainers and Matt's scruffy outfit, Keith was beginning to feel distinctly overdressed in his orange cadet uniform. This was not what he had been expecting.

  
Vaguely, he realised he should probably have given a response to Shiro's greeting, but he couldn't think of one so he settled for silence. Did Matt know of the scenario that had brought him here? The other man's body language did not indicate much but for a single-minded focus on his own work.

  
"As you can probably guess, there are about seven million things we need to do before we can initiate you into training," Shiro continued, running a hand through his hair and making his fringe stick upwards like a cockatiel's feathers. It was only just past seven, and he already looked as if he wanted to go back to bed. "I've cleared the situation with Iverson. If you pass training, your entire curriculum will be shifted around to accommodate."

  
"I didn't realise there would be lectures four billion miles out in the Kuiper Belt."

  
Shiro blinked at his sharp tone, then laughed. "Unfortunately, since this is a... well, an extraordinary situation, we've had to take some unusual measures. Since you'll be switching from fighter training to long-haul-"

  
"I'm not switching."

  
There was a pause.

  
"I'm sorry?"

  
"I said, I'm not switching." Keith's fists clenched at his sides. "I'm only here because of your actions. I don't know what story you've spun to your little buddies but if you hadn't got yourself involved in my progress in the Garrison then we wouldn't be having this conversation at all. Whether or not you manage to drag me off on this jaunt across the solar system, I'm still a fighter pilot, and I'll train until I become one, no matter how long it takes. It's what I'm good at. It's the only thing I'm good at."

  
He hadn't meant for the last sentence to slip out, but there it was, hanging in the air between them like smoke. Matt hadn't turned away from his screen, but tension had sent a sudden rigidity into his frame. Shiro looked at Keith for several long seconds, then let out a low exhalation and gestured for the younger man to follow him over to his workspace.

  
The desk was surprisingly void of organisation, with the laptop humming beside a stash of snacks that extended to much more than just one bag of crisps. Keith wondered if Shiro was making the most of his only opportunity to eat junk food, away from the watchful eye of his superiors who no doubt had him on a punishing regime of healthy eating and exercise. Pinned to the noticeboard above the desk were several photographs, and Keith's gaze lingered for a moment on youthful faces, broad smiles, classrooms and living rooms and vibrant blue skies. The idea of friends and family close enough to want to have images of them by your side at all times was so alien it might as well have been some complex concept presented to him in one of his lectures.

  
Shiro pulled a chair away from the wall, placed it beside the desk and gestured for Keith to sit down before doing so himself. He didn't speak for several moments, steepling his fingers and looking thoughtfully toward the laptop screen, which displayed charts and lines of codes that meant very little to Keith. When Shiro finally spoke, his voice was quiet.

  
"I'm sorry if you feel you were dragged into this against your will."

  
Keith blinked at him, frowned, and then looked back toward Matt, who seemed to be just out of earshot judging by the fact that he had returned to squinting at his screen and typing furiously. Well, if Shiro was planning on a false apology in front of the other man in order to redeem himself after Keith's accusation, it wasn't going to get him very far.

  
"How could I not feel like that?" Keith retorted after a moment. "You forced me into this situation. You knew I would snap and you just kept pushing."

  
"I did push you too far."

  
Keith hadn't been expecting him to admit it that easily. For a moment, he didn't know how to respond, but Shiro spoke again before he could.

  
"I didn't intend to. I didn't mean to make you 'snap'." He paused, an unreadable expression crossing his face. "This is a new situation for me. There are so many hopes and expectations piled on myself, Professor Holt and Matt. A lot of pressure. I never intended to drag in a... a cadet, of all people, to potentially become co-pilot for the furthest-reaching space voyage humanity has ever managed. I know it'll take months of training and a thousand hoops to jump through, but... I think it could be the making of you."

  
Keith tried to force back the instinctive surge of pride that rose in his chest at the other man's last words. "If we don't all die first. How is this even legal?"

  
"It's... almost legal." Shiro gave a sheepish and startingly boyish grin, a sharp foil to the gravity of his words. "It's just lucky we have so many of the higher-ups on side. I have a... way of getting what I want."

  
"I noticed," Keith said through gritted teeth. "So you just thought you could pick me out like a toy in a crane machine and go 'I want that one'?"

  
"No. No, that's not it at all." Shiro muttered a curse and scrubbed his face with his hands. "I'm sure you've been told many times how frustrating you are to deal with."

  
"Yes."

  
"You don't have to sound so proud of it," Shiro muttered, narrowing his eyes, and despite himself Keith felt a smirk twist the corners of his mouth. After a moment, Shiro managed a smile back and leant forward on the desk, resuming his irritating foot-jiggling habit from his appearance in Keith's lecture a week ago. Perhaps it indicated nervousness or tension. Keith found that difficult to believe, but Shiro definitely seemed to have shed his otherwise constant cloak of self-assurance for this conversation.

  
"I heard about you from a colleague after I returned from my last job. One of the most highly-skilled cadets they'd ever witnessed, apparently, with an almost instinctive talent. They reported that it's as if you take hold of the controls and become part of the craft - that you almost forget yourself. Which is probably why you find it so difficult to maintain any sort of connection with your fellow cadets. Your mind has one sole focus - flying."

  
"Isn't that how it should be?" Keith had no idea how to respond to the praise that littered the first part of Shiro's statement, so he ignored it. He had no way to know if it was genuine anyway, or if Shiro was simply reeling off nice words that he believed would get Keith on side.

  
"Yes, but there are other aspects to consider," Shiro replied patiently. "Teamwork is incredibly important. If we can't trust one another, the mission is doomed before it begins. I'm not just talking about Kerberos - I'm talking about anything, right down to the smallest reconnaisance task. As a fighter pilot, you may fly single-handed, but you always remain part of a team. In a long-haul flight, you live and work together. If you can't cope with that, then perhaps this isn't the right career path for you."

  
Keith scowled. Shiro was right, and he knew his words would get beneath the younger man's skin. "I can do it. I need to do it."

  
"Good man. That's the spirit." Shiro gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder that once again almost sent him face-first into the desk. Keith rubbed his shoulder blade and resisted the urge to tell him to stop doing that before he broke something. There was a part of him - a tiny, deeply-buried part - that didn't quite hate the companionable contact Shiro and Matt exhibited. It was... different, somehow, to the stiff handshakes and cold nods shared between the rest of the Garrison staff. There was an honesty there. A sense of acceptance. Keith would never like unnecessary physical contact and was fervently hoping Shiro wouldn't actually manage to knock him over next time he decided to give him a cheery pat on the shoulder, but he couldn't deny that the thought of spending several months in the depths of space with these two as companions was certainly more preferable to doing the same with any of his fellow cadets.

  
"I'm aware that these are extraordinary circumstances and that this whole thing is borderline crazy," Shiro continued. "Just because I got you here, it's no guarantee that you'll get through the training. Realistically, we should have a shortlist, narrowed down from a significant selection of candidates. But - and keep this between us - we've got nothing. No one with the inherent ability that you have. There's something about you that fascinates me, I won't lie. Your bloody-minded fixation on your target is quite something. I just think it needs a better focus. The Garrison is not providing that."

  
"Better not let them hear that, you might lose your front-page spot on the papers when your next big mission comes around," Keith remarked.

  
Shiro raised an eyebrow. "I'm not their poster boy."

  
"Doesn't look that way from where I'm standing."

  
"Yes. Well. We're not talking about me." Shiro folded his arms and kicked back in his seat, hooking one foot around the desk leg to balance himself. Keith wondered if if it was possible for him to fall off or if he possessed some magical cat-like balancing skill to match his other talents. A part of him wanted to push the chair over and see what happened. "The fact is, we're here, and you have a decision to make."

  
"I thought that decision was taken out of my hands when you ordered me to work with you as penance for trying to punch you in the face."

  
The statement wasn't intended to be humorous, but Shiro snorted with laughter. "Well, yeah, you've already made that decision. But here's the part I didn't - couldn't - tell you a week ago. And understand that this doesn't go beyond this room." He waited for Keith's nod before he continued. "Whatever happened, Iverson was gunning for you to be dismissed. You were too much of a risk, too disruptive - but the higher-ups were all embroiled in this huge debate about the whole issue because kicking you out would have, firstly, resulted in media speculation the Garrison really doesn't want. And secondly, it would have been an extraordinary waste of your talent and potential."

  
Keith didn't respond. He didn't know what to say. That all of this had been going on above him for weeks - months? - was more than he could get his head around.

  
"But anyway, you're here now. And this decision is really yours - whether you want to assist us on a low-level basis or not. Either way, you're going to be moved from cadet dorms to pilot residence and your curriculum will be shifted to accomodate for your new placement within the Garrison. You'll learn remotely via online courses while undergoing studying alongside us. The decision that is down to you concerns your placement from there. You can continue on your original path to inner solar system combat work, or you can progress from that with unique experience from us."

  
"Progress to being shot four billion miles into space to land on a twelve-mile rock and collect some ice," Keith said slowly.

  
"That's about the long and short of it, yeah."

  
Keith ran his fingers along the hem of his uniform again, his gaze trailing their movement. "I'm not ready. Your mission is in a few months."

  
"Seven months. We can fast-track the training, if necessary. _I_ can fast-track it - I've done it before, for smaller missions. Since you'd only ever be registered as support staff, there's a little less red tape to work our way around. It would be difficult, I'm not going to lie. But there's something about you." Shiro's chair legs landed again with a thump and he rested his chin on his hand to study the younger man. Keith shifted uncomfortably beneath his surprisingly piercing gaze. "The reason your professors have lost their way with teaching you is because you don't need teaching, not any more. Your abilities need taming, in a sense. They're raw and untried. You're good and you know it, but you need to be able to channel that extraordinary skill. In a way, you've surpassed those who were intended to teach you. That's why they're struggling. And why, I suspect, you get so much trouble from other students."

  
Keith met his eyes, and then looked down at his own lap. "Yes." He couldn't stop the hint of bitterness that slipped into his voice, prevalent even in that one syllable.

  
Shiro nodded slowly. Was that sympathy on his face? Keith didn't want sympathy, but he didn't have the energy to argue any more. This was all so overwhelming. And above it all, he hadn't been expecting to be given a choice. He was here, pulled from the routine that had become such an enormous part of his life, and nothing was going to change that; but what he did from here was down to him. Two paths. The same one he had been walked down since the moment he left school, the one that initially started a fire in his heart, but the further he progressed down it the further away his goal seemed to shift. The unflinching rigidity of his routine and the distance between himself and his classmates formed a blanket that felt as if it was suffocating him. And then the second option, a complete shift, his world tilting on its axis and elevating him into a position of more authority, more responsibility, to become more than what he was and more than what he could ever be as a mere Garrison fighter pilot. To fly beside the best of the best. Deep down, despite every trick Shiro had played to get him here, despite the terror that whirled in the depths of his stomach, he knew he had already chosen.

  
Shiro didn't speak, allowing him the time to think, eventually pulling his gaze away from Keith to focus again on his laptop. Keith looked upward and further still to the enormous structure that curved above them, wrought in gleaming white metal with antennae bristling in every direction like a thousand spears ready for battle.

  
"You knew I wouldn't accept your help unless you found a way to force me," he said softly, after several long minutes of silence.

  
Shiro glanced up from where he had been studying his screen while chewing the end of a pen. He looked at him for a moment, perhaps trying to analyse his tone, then gave a resigned smile. "Is it that obvious?"

  
"I could tell you were acting from the very beginning. The Oscars certainly don't have anything to worry about."

  
There was a snort from Matt's direction and Shiro scowled.

  
"Then why didn't you say something?"

  
"I thought I'd play along, until you started to really rile me up," Keith replied with a shrug.

  
"Do you try to hit anyone who riles you up?"

  
"Only sometimes. You have a particularly irritating face."

  
This time Matt let out a squawk of laughter and slapped his knee in great mirth, while Shiro sighed in exasperation.

 

"I guess I already have your answer then."

  
"What answer?" Keith asked, genuinely perplexed.

  
"For where you want to go from here."

  
"I want to go to Kerberos."

  
"I can totally understand - wait. What?" The pen dropped out of Shiro's mouth and rolled away across the lab, but he didn't bother to go after it. "You're serious?"

  
"Of course." Keith wasn't sure how much sincerity he needed to inject into his tone before the other man believed him, especially not after their previous differences. But he was serious. He had never been more serious about anything in his life.

  
"Oh. Well. In that case, we have a lot of work to do."

  
Keith had an absurd urge to laugh at the fact that for all the work he had put into twisting the entire situation to his advantage, Shiro had not actually anticipated that he would agree. In the end, it was all down to Keith - they couldn't drag him onto the voyage kicking and screaming. And here he was, doing exactly as they had wanted all along. He had no idea how he felt - the only thing he was certain of was that his entire life was about to turn upside down. And he would be ready for it, whatever happened. No going back now.

 

*****

 

Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. The monotony that had plagued Keith's time as a cadet was replaced with a constant and chaotic flurry of activity as every day was filled with tests and training and endless reams of reports. Keith slouched back to his bed in the pilots' residence every night with eyelids at half-mast from exhaustion and streams of calculations running relentlessly through his head. His hands ached from clutching the simulation controls, his mind full of keypad combinations and flight paths and emergency procedures. He felt as if the night sky had burned its image into the backs of his eyelids, blackness punctuated by jewel-bright stars and one tiny, grainy planet that meant so much. He had never been so tired in his life.

 

But he felt alive.

  
Being amongst graduates and accomplished pilots was an entirely different experience to training with his fellow cadets. Then, there had been nothing but snide remarks, jealousy, bitterness. A constant and relentless urge to bring everyone else down in order to elevate yourself. Here, there was none of that. They had a job to do, and it would be done. Keith's experience was nothing compared to that of the people he was now surrounded by; he had gone from prodigy to entry-level. But they treated him as an equal, more than his instructors had ever done. He was not merely a bundle of statistics to be studied and debated about. He was a member of the Kerberos team.

  
There were a few who objected to his presence there, of course. It was inevitable. To those unaware of the situation, he appeared to simply be a cadet elevated into a position of high authority on a whim from Shiro. The favourite's favourite. Keith ignored any animosity. Once, he would have responded, even thrown a punch or two - he had tried on the first snide comment, until Shiro had grabbed him, pulled him into another corridor and told him in no uncertain terms that if he tried it again he'd be off the mission. He was not about to take that risk. It took an extraordinary amount of willpower that he had never had to exercise before, but he built up an immunity over the months, and focused only on the tasks at hand.

  
Keith had met Professor Holt several times on his visits to the simulation lab, but owing to his busy schedule it was a rare occasion when their paths crossed. From what he could tell, the other man was pleased with his progress, but seemed content to allow Shiro to take on most of the responsibility for Keith's training and overall wellbeing. It made sense. The two aspects of the mission and the two distinct roles - scientist and pilot - were extremely different. They were a team, but they each had their own responsibility. Even though there was a slim chance he would need to take on a primary role in the mission, Keith was determined to prove he was worthy of the place he had been given. The fire that had burned since his first day at the Garrison, that had reduced to barely more than a flicker at his lowest ebb, had returned to set heat into his veins and a roaring in his ears.

  
He had never imagined he would find himself among people he would ever consider friends, but it was slowly, tentatively, that over the months Keith found himself believing they could be. Matt was more than happy to live up to Keith's initial, rather unflattered impressions, but was an incredibly hard worker and did an excellent job of pulling the team together whenever their motivation took a hit. He and Shiro had known one another for years and their trust in one another was clear to see. That trust extended to Keith once they had got past the first few difficult weeks in which the younger man struggled to adapt to his new routine and to the brutal pace at which the three of them needed to work to ensure the months ahead went to plan.

  
Keith's impression of Shiro had shifted as enormously as, he suspected, Shiro's impression of him. To say they had started out on the wrong foot was an understatement. Both had revealed their worst sides to one another at first sight, and between Shiro's clumsy bullying tactics and Keith's ferocious temper it was a wonder they hadn't ripped one another's eyes out within minutes. Keith was well aware that if Shiro hadn't persisted so relentlesly in offering his help, and then goaded him into turning the situation to his advantage when that didn't work, that he probably wouldn't be here at all. He didn't like it, and it could hardly be considered responsible behaviour from the Garrison's most lauded pilot; but sometimes, what was morally right and what was the best option weren't always the same, and Keith was all too painfully aware that he was an extremely difficult person to deal with at the best of times. Sometimes, he needed a gentle shove to get him to see what was right in front of him. Or a not-so-gentle slap on the shoulder that almost sent him into the nearest wall.

  
The facade that Shiro had built up around himself - or perhaps, that the Garrison had built up for him - was largely a fabrication. There was no option during their months of long hours and draining tasks other than to reveal their true sides to one another, and Keith found someone very different beneath the distant and self-assured figure the public loved to put on a pedestal. The most successful space exploration pilot in decades was, beneath all the awards and glory, a surprisingly disorganised man with terrible handwriting, a penchant for hoarding junk food and a habit of singing absently along to his music player when everyone else was trying to concentrate. The last time this had happened, Matt had thrown an instruction manual at the back of his head with startling strength for a man of his slender stature. The resulting silence was apparently a relief for him but came accompanied with some quite impressive sulking from Shiro. The next time Matt had left the room, Keith had headed over to Shiro's desk to unplug his headphones, play his music out loud and, to the older man's utter shock, join in with the singing. Matt looked as if he wanted to pull his hair out when he returned to a cacophany of noise.  
Their days were not without the odd spat, but with three vibrant personalities working in such proximity with one another that was no surprise. Keith once lost his temper after pulling an all-nighter when he saw Shiro brushing his fringe back yet again and snapped that he might as well just cut it off. Shiro had retorted that Keith could do well taking a trip to the hairdresser himself and the situation had almost descended into a petty exchange of insults before Matt appeared and told them to go and take a nap before either of them exploded. Later at dinner, the two had been fine with no mention of either needing a haircut, leaving Matt looking as if he had aged ten years with exasperation.

  
Vulnerability was another aspect they could not hide during the months of relentless and exhausting work. Keith couldn't deny that even during his days as a cadet he had not experienced such a punishing regime. These were extreme circumstances and they all needed to work twice as hard as anyone heading on a standard voyage would have to. Matt once burst into tears of pure frustration - and a distinct lack of sleep - when a code he had been working on for two weeks persistently refused to work, and it took Shiro several trips to and from the canteen with cups of tea and snacks to placate him. Keith's outbursts were barbed and vicious but blessedly brief. He threw around insults and the occasional object before leaving the room to cool down and returning ten minutes later with a significantly clearer head. Shiro rarely lost his temper, but the other two could usually tell when he was about to by his sudden disappearances to one of the training yards or the gym to work out his frustrations rather than taking them out on his teammates.

  
Keith had found himself just as capable of pulling all-nighters as Matt as long as he stockpiled enough caffeine, but it became clear that this was not one of Shiro's skills when they found him at three in the morning slumped on his desk. He was distinctly morose when they woke him, having dreamt of home, and Keith had made him promise to call his family the next day before ordering him to go to bed and get some proper sleep. There was no doubt he had become used to being away from them for months at a time with his work, but the particular stress of this mission's preparation had left everyone vulnerable. For the first time, Keith found himself grateful that he didn't have any family attachments to hold him back. Matt soon put paid to that when he found out about Keith's past - or lack thereof - by proclaiming that Shiro was the father of their little group, Matt himself was the crazy uncle and Keith could be the 'bratty child'. Keith was less than amused by this, but his mood lightened after Matt wrote 'Space Dad' on Shiro's favourite mug and it wouldn't wash off.

  
Seven months after Keith's initiation into the Kerberos training regime, he graduated. It was a rushed affair with no sense of ceremony - just the way he liked it. Nobody within the Garrison was entirely sure how to approach the situation - the only certainty was that a cadet simply could not be involved in such a voyage, and so for the sake of formality he needed to be put through graduation a year early. He was far beyond graduation stage at this point anyway, with seventy-two local test flights, fourteen long-haul cargo jobs and one accompaniment on an inner solar system mission under his belt. Keith had stacked up more experience in a matter of months than some pilots achieved in years due to a combination of his mentor's position of authority and his own ruthless determination. When he heard one of his previous instructors referring to him as 'the next Shirogane', he heard only sincerity in her voice, and the fire in his chest roared not with rage, but with pride.

  
The night before the Kerberos launch, he, Shiro and Matt accompanied several other pilots recently returned from missions to the Garrison's closest neighbour - a small town formed of a bar, a few scattered houses and little else. Their companions became steadily, raucously drunk while they remained sober due not only to the fact that piloting a spacecraft while hungover was not the best idea (not to mention Keith wasn't legal yet), but also because they wanted to savour this night with clear heads. This view of the desert's smooth plains, washed out to a dusky lilac, was one they would not see for a long time.

  
"How are you feeling?" Shiro asked after a long period of companionable silence. He sat with his elbows resting on his knees, a soft breeze stirring his dark hair.

  
Keith followed the other man's gaze to the sky above, a black canvas studded with tiny pinpricks of light. Out here where the artificial glow of humanity was overtaken by swathes of craggy natural landscapes, the Milky Way trailed above like a glittering, nebulous scarf. "I'm terrified."

  
There was a pause, then a wicked grin spread across Shiro's face. "Hi, terrified."

  
"Shiro," Matt groaned. Keith blinked, perplexed.

  
"I'm Dad."

  
_"No!"_ Matt punched Shiro in the arm and the two descended into a dusty scuffle on the ground. Keith dodged out of the way and scrambled to his feet before a flailing limb could catch him in the face; a loud laugh split the air, and it took him a moment to realise that it had come from himself. The sound was so unexpected, so alien; in his entire childhood and his time at the Garrison, he had never truly found a reason to laugh. It became clear that Matt and Shiro had never heard such a sound from him before either, judging by the fact that they had paused in their tussle, looking his way with eyes like saucers. But it didn't feel wrong. He was... happy. He was with family. For the first time, he felt whole.

  
Only the wind and the rumble of a distant aircraft accompanied them as they headed back toward the distant shape of the compound, which lay in a clutter of dark walls and windows amidst the swells of the desert. Keith almost tripped over Matt's foot when he attempted to memorise the constellations above as he walked. They would be doing a lot of stargazing in their journey ahead; but the view would be entirely different from the other side of the solar system. Anticipation thrummed in his veins, just managing to edge out the terror that still lingered in his gut. The adventure ahead would be petrifying and incredible. He could do it. Finally, he was ready.

  
The scuffle of feet on sand was loud behind him, but he didn't turn immediately, presuming Matt and Shiro had got themselves into another boyish fight. It was only when a shout split the air that he spun around, his eyes widening at the sight of a group of young men approaching at a pace from the town not far behind them. The reek of alcohol filled the air; the men were unsteady on their feet, but not totally beyond control. This became clear when their intentions were revealed. One of the men sprinted forward and made a grab for the phone hanging out of Matt's pocket while another attempted an unwise punch in Shiro's direction. The first assailant succeeded in his attempt while the second went down like a sack of potatoes when Shiro's elbow met the back of his head. Keith, momentarily frozen, simply stared at the scene unfolding before him and was only pulled back into the present as he was wrenched from his feet. He dropped, rolled, and grabbed the knife that permanently sat beneath the waistband of his jeans. It was the only possession he had had for as long as he could remember, and though it made no sense whatsoever for a baby to be found in the middle of nowhere clutching a wrapped blade, it was the only link he had to where he had come from. He wasn't about to get rid of it.

  
The other pilots who had accompanied them to the bar had remained behind to enjoy yet another round of drinks. The three of them were on their own, and judging by the fact that Matt had disappeared somewhere behind the wall of figures, the situation was quickly getting out of control. Shiro was holding his own, but he couldn't fend off seven - or was it eight? - men. Keith had stacked up a decent amount of combat experience at the Garrison but this was a whole different story.

  
A fist flew at his face and he dodged swiftly before returning the strike. A second later, a foot swept beneath his own and he fell to his knees with a grunt. The knife slipped from his hands and he scrambled after it with a frantic gasp. When he eventually made it to his feet, he was greeted by the sight of three shapes silhouetted against the glare of the moon. One man had his arms wrapped around Shiro; he was significantly smaller, but he held him pinned for long enough to allow the other figure behind him to swing a broken bottle toward their victim's head.

  
Time stopped. Keith's mouth dropped open, but no words came out. He moved, but he felt as if he was wading through a swamp. His fingers closed on nothing.

  
His boots slid in the sand, and everything rushed back in a chaotic blur of colour and sound. Keith surged to his feet with a wordless scream and hurled himself at the man with the bottle. Light darted across its surface as it arced high in the air, and the two men went down in a flurry of dust, the air broken by the harsh sounds of mindless violence.

  
A shockwave hit him, sudden indescribable pain blooming in the back of his skull, and then darkness pulled him under. Sound and vision faded like colour from a sheet, and this time, there was no fuzzy image of a distant moon to greet him.

 

*****

 

Silence. The whisper of movement - curtains? Sheets? No, not silence. A steady, constant beeping permeated the air, faint but insistent.  
An alarm clock? Of course. It had to be. 6am. Time to wrench himself out of bed for another day of simulation training. His mind had barely recovered from trying to memorise the complex sequence of yesterday's regime.

  
Keith lifted a hand to switch off the alarm clock, then stopped when something pulled at its back. He squinted blearily, frowning when the sight before him resolved itself into something that made sense - or didn't make sense, in this case. White sheets - his sheets at the Garrison were grey. Gauzy curtains lifted in a gentle breeze to his right; the window in his tiny room in the pilots' residence was to the right of his bed. Buried in the skin at the back of his hand was an IV, and for a moment Keith simply looked at it, as if waiting for it to magically turn into something else. It might as well do, for all the reason he could find for it to be there.

  
The hospital wing. Why was he in the hospital wing?

  
His brows knitted together as he struggled to pin down the events that had led him here. They had been out for a drink - or not as the case may be, since none of them could afford to lose their clarity the night before the Kerberos launch.

  
The launch.

  
Keith cursed and swung his legs out of bed, then let out a whimper as the room swayed around him. His head was pounding and it took several long seconds for the blurriness to clear from his vision. He pushed his hair back from his face and felt the rough surface of a blood-crusted bandage. There had been a man with a bottle... He had been aiming for Shiro. Keith's breath hissed sharply between his teeth and he reached out to slam his hand down on the bell beside the bed.

  
It took several minutes for a member of medical staff to enter the room, and during those few minutes Keith used every ounce of willpower he possessed not to leap out of bed and run from the room to find out if his companions were alright. Matt could never have held his own against men fuelled only by alcohol and a mindless urge for violence. And Shiro - physically, he was much stronger, but even he had his limits. Keith itched to know where they were, what had happened.

  
"Ah, Keith... Kogane, is it?"

  
"Never mind that," Keith snapped before the woman had even crossed the room's threshold. "Where are Shiro and Matt? Are they OK?"

  
She looked at him for a moment, and then her expression softened slightly. "They're fine. Takashi Shirogane gave me this and asked me to pass it onto you."

  
Keith blinked stupidly at her and held out a hand to take the sheet of folded paper she passed him, swatting her away when she moved to check his wound. Shiro's distinctive blocky handwriting met him when he unfolded the note.

 

  
_Keith,_

  
_I'm so sorry. By the time you read this we'll have already launched. I tried everything - we both tried everything to delay events, but there was nothing we could do. Your head injury was too severe for you to be cleared for flight even if we'd managed to push the date back several days. Please believe me when I say that I had no choice. I really wanted you on this mission and I know you wanted it too. I could see the fire in your eyes._

  
_I want to say a huge thank you for what you did for me. You put yourself at huge risk and I might be dead if it weren't for you. I feel incredibly guilty - ashamed - that you would be here if I hadn't ended up in trouble._

  
_Matt is fine - we both are. We had to delay the launch by 24 hours due to Matt's mild concussion but were cleared to fly a couple of hours ago (it's Friday 27th as I write this). I don't know when you'll wake up but I hope you'll be fine. I know you'll be fine. You're tougher than all of us._

  
_I recovered your knife from the sand and requested for it to be left in your dorm. It's unusual - you'll have to tell me about it when we return. Let's meet up in a couple of months. It'll fly by, I promise, but I would have loved for you to be here with us to experience this journey. Thank you for your hard work over the last seven months. Even if you didn't make it here, you've been invaluable to us. Next time, eh?_

  
_See you soon and sorry again._

  
_Takashi_

 

  
The letter slipped from still fingers to land on the bedcovers. Keith barely noticed as the doctor moved to check his blood pressure. When he finally found his voice, it was barely audible.

  
"What day is it?"

  
She responded without hesitation, apparently oblivious to his turmoil. "It's Sunday the 29th."

Keith swallowed back a lump in his throat and picked up the letter again, but the words swam before his eyes. He didn't need to read it again to understand, anyway. He wasn't going to Kerberos. A team - a companionship - forged from a single-minded focus on one simple goal had broken, and he was left behind, sitting dazed and bloody in a hospital bed while Shiro and Matt were halfway across the solar system in a glittering blaze of stars.

 

*****

 

Keith had thought, when he unfolded that small piece of paper with trembling fingers, that the bottom of his world had already dropped out. Blackness yawned beneath him like a gaping maw, a darkness so complete that no stars hid within its depths. No soft glow of a distant moon, or the gleam of starlight on metal and wings.

  
He had thought he could fall no lower than he had in the moment when he discovered that his successes of the last seven months had fallen to nothing. But it took precisely one month and four days for him to discover that he had underestimated what it really felt like for his world to cave in on itself.

  
Keith had been assigned back to long-haul cargo trips once the Garrison found themselves in the awkward position of having a spare and exceptionally talented graduate staying behind instead of blasting off to the Kuiper Belt. He had fallen back into a mindless routine without complaint, happy to have something to occupy his thoughts, to prevent them from circling back to the same inevitable point. There would never be an opportunity like this again, and he had missed out on it for the sake of one stupid brawl that, for once, had not been his fault. The irony was like a knife to the ribs.

  
He had returned from a two-day trip and was passing through one of the Garrison's communal rooms on the way to his own when the sound of a familiar name caught his attention. Keith slowed in the middle of shrugging off his jacket and came to a halt to see the faces of Shiro, Professor Holt and Matt looking back at him from perfectly-posed publicity shots. An update - the first one since they launched. Keith threw his jacket aside and stepped closer to the TV.

  
"- mission to the distant moon of Kerberos is missing. The Galaxy Garrison has said the crash was presumably caused by pilot error. The Garrison confirms that since the craft possessed multiple backup systems, all signs point to one tragic explanation."

  
Keith's knees buckled.

  
"All crew members are believed to be dead."

  
Keith didn't feel the pain of impact from his knees striking the floor, or the voices of concern from his fellow pilots when they discovered him kneeling before a TV screen with tears streaming down his face. Arms tried to lift him but he resisted them. Everything faded, everything melted away until there was only tunnel vision left, only the sight of those faces on the TV screen. Brave and smiling figures of the only friends he had ever known, wrenched into the cold depths of space to die alone.

  
The next time he ventured onto the Garrison's roof to watch the sky, the stars above appeared nothing more than stones in a void of black.


	11. Fragments

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I somehow managed to delete a scene so here it is again. Doing some shuffling on the chapters. Sorry if anyone got an update on this and thought it was a new one!

Memories once as vibrant as the Milky Way he had viewed with such awe faded out like the image on a faulty TV screen until only murky shapes lingered behind his eyes. Keith tried to grasp them, to reach out and snatch them back, but they flitted out of his grip like darting fish and vanished into the darkness. His fists clenched on nothing, and he let out a wordless sound, a sob and a growl and a cry of utter helplessness all in one.

  
He needed to hold onto them, to absorb them back into himself, however painful they were to recall. He was losing himself. Pieces were shattering, breaking away, and it felt as if only the tiniest margin prevented the last fragments of him from tipping into the void after them.

  
He told himself firmly and repeatedly that Shiro was alive. It was a mantra, a constant rhythm he used to root himself. The final images of his dream were not recollections of the last time they had seen one another, and they would see each other again. He would not allow himself to consider anything else.

  
As for Matt and Samuel, he had no idea. They were beyond his reach and merely imagining would could have become of them felt like a physical pain. He turned his attention away, guilt dragging at him all the while, and focused only on what he knew, a solid platform that kept him from falling into black space. Somewhere out there, the paladins were like pinpricks of light amongst a cloying smoke that wreathed his every thought. He would not let them die. He had to reach them again.

  
The world tilted, flickered, and he grabbed onto a memory at random in a desperate attempt to ground himself. The moment he intercepted the Garrison's quarantine crew in order to break Shiro out. The brief scuffle between himself and Lance and his own reluctant decision to drag the others along with him during their white-knuckle escape journey. The day everything had changed. When he became more than just a Garrison drop-out, a pilot with more promise than had been seen for years reduced to a loner chasing ghosts with only the desert wind for company. He had become a paladin of Voltron.

  
Keith would have liked to believe he held some sixth sense that Shiro had survived Kerberos, in much the same way that he had been able to detect the presence of the lions. But he hadn't. However much it hurt to admit it, there was a part of him that had begun to believe he would never come home, that the day the news report had been broadcast to the nation was the day the Kerberos mission truly had been destroyed in the black depths of space. He had never accepted it; but it had crept up on him like a sickness regardless, gnawing on his consciousness, hardening his heart to little more than cold stone before he had a chance to realise it was there.

  
Shiro was not the same man who had left for Kerberos - that was undeniable. Keith would have been naive to expect that whatever he had experienced out there, he would return whole and unaffected, but he had somehow not anticipated the extent to just how much things had changed between them. The moment Shiro had woken in Keith's shack in the desert, of course there had been cries of relief, tears, rib-crushing hugs. There had been exclamations of dismay when Keith explained his dismissal from Garrison service and held-back sobs when Shiro recounted the little he could remember of his experience at the hands of the Galra. But between them, an invisible wall had settled, as thin as cobwebs but clinging, cloying, tangible. Their relationship could not remain the same when so much had been broken and put back together with pieces shattered and missing.

  
For the most part, the other paladins seemed merely awestruck by their hurriedly appointed leader. They were not aware of what had come before. Lance had described Shiro as his idol - but Keith had not missed the split-second moment of indecision when Shiro had approached the younger man to thank him for his help in the rescue, and Lance had realised that the hand being extended to him was not one of flesh and blood. But he had shaken it. Perhaps he believed the great pilot Takashi Shirogane could not possibly be altered by the disaster of Kerberos. The only impression he had held of Shiro at that point was the one the media recounted on front pages and TV features. He didn't know him like Keith did. He didn't see the difference in him - not just in scars layered over scars and hair turned from deepest black to pure white from trauma. He didn't see the emptiness behind the other man's eyes. But Keith did, and he was scared.

  
Shiro had always been brave, of course. You couldn't afford to allow your fear to show when you were about to fly off into depths of space that humankind had never explored before. He still was. The Black Lion would not have chosen him otherwise. Allura wouldn't have chosen him. But now there was something beneath that facade, something wild and barely contained and - dare he say it? - tainted.

  
No one among them knew Shiro better than Keith. They couldn't see the void, the hollow where the Galra had ripped out a part of him and left something in its place. Something no one understood, certainly not Shiro himself. The last thing Keith wanted to admit to himself was that Shiro could not be trusted - but now, when his own world was ripping itself apart at the seams and everything he thought he knew about himself was a lie, anything seemed possible.

  
The ground shook beneath his feet and his head pounded as if someone had buried an axe in it. He gritted his teeth as the images behind his eyes flickered like a faulty TV screen and collapsed into nothing.

  
"Kethran."

  
His Galran name - or Altean? He didn't know. But it was his true name, or so Zarkon insisted.

  
It seemed too much of a coincidence that his human name had ended up so similar to the one he had been given at birth, unless his mother had left a note in the pod he had been hurled to Earth in. If that was the case, why would those who had found him decide to alter it unless they suspected it to be of extraterrestrial origin? He had always suspected the news of the Kerberos incident to be part of one enormous cover-up. Perhaps he was merely one small part of an entangled string of events. Insignificant but for his birthright.

  
The world rocked again and Keith growled in pain. The sound was feral, a rumble deep in his chest that ascended in pitch as he pulled at the bindings holding him to the chair. He didn't know where he was being held; the cloth across his eyes allowed only a toxic purple glow to seep into the corners of his vision. Likewise, he had no idea how long he had been here. The hours - days? - had merged together into one endless blur, a constant war while he grappled to hold onto his memories, his sense of self, even as Haggar used her poisonous powers to pull his mind into pieces.

  
Was this how they had tortured Shiro? If it was true, Keith didn't know how he had survived an entire year. Perhaps only by blanking most of it out. Keith still didn't understand the little he had heard of Shiro and Pidge's discussion of the 'Champion'. Pidge believed Shiro had harmed Matt, but had later apologised. The entire exchange had left Keith bemused, especially because Shiro seemed to know as little about it as if he had not been there in the first place.

  
Keith was experiencing a mere fraction of what Shiro had experienced, and he already felt as if he was losing grip of all that had come before. Haggar's torture pulled at the threads that tied his very self together. He could almost see the sinuous movements of her magic in his mind as vibrant purple streaks against a field of black, creeping into every facet of his mind, his personality, the knowledge he had gained from his years in the Garrison, his time as a paladin and his experiences alone in the desert. They expanded and contracted like ice, dousing the fire in his soul, cracks reverberating into every part of him. He had to hold on with all the strength he could muster - but strength was hard to come by, without the presence of his fellow paladins. People he had never wanted to end up relying on - save for Shiro. He had always told himself he could cope on his own, with anything that was thrown at him. But he couldn't, and the warm companionship of his time with Hunk, Lance, Pidge and Shiro felt like litle more than a long-distant memory.

  
Haggar was trying to take over his mind; that much was obvious. He had refused to cooperate, so she had found another way. It didn't matter to her if his mind was clear and present, as long as his physical form was at her command. Perhaps this was what the aliens they had rescued from the Galra ship weeks ago had meant when they mentioned the 'Champion'. Shiro bore the scars, but his memory was a blank. Had Haggar poisoned his mind, turned him against his fellow captives - against Matt and Samuel? Keith's chest tightened at the thought. It made sense. But then, why the prosthetic? Keith had always had the uncomfortable feeling that the intention behind replacing Shiro's original right arm with Galra tech was for more than just an experiment in turning their prisoners into fighting machines. After all, if Shiro's memory was correct, they had not done the same to Matt, Samuel or any of their other prisoners. Perhaps it was simply because their champion was the strongest of their captives and they wanted to push the limits, to see if they could make him more powerful still.

  
Or maybe that was simply part of the plan, and the Galra tech formed an easy route directly into his mind for Haggar to assume control.

  
Did they plan to do the same to Keith? His fingers clenched on the arms of the chair, metal bands digging painfully into his wrists. Would he be sedated only to wake up to find his arm or leg replaced with cold unfeeling metal? Or would they be far less concerned with his own comfort and safety and simply throw him into an arena with a hardened warrior ready to rip him to shreds? He had a feeling he already knew the answer. Shiro did not remember that part of his own experience; the closest thing to a blessing amongst everything else.

  
Wait. Keith's grip tightened again. They didn't need to find a back door into his mind. He was one of them. The same toxic powers that ran beneath the skin of everyone else on this ship also hummed in his veins in a silent and perpetual rhythm. He could feel it now, faint tingles in his hands and feet, the hairs on the back of his neck rising in response to the sensation of enormous power around him. His entire body seemed to whisper _"Home."_

  
No. He pulled against his bonds and heard a faint cackle somewhere behind him - or was it inside his head? He wanted to shake his head like a dog as if the insidious whispers inside his mind would fly away like water droplets. He was not one of them. This was not his home.

  
Home was... He faltered, paused, stilled for a moment.

  
Where was his home?

  
Not any of the places he had grown up in. Regular meals and a place to sleep did not compensate for the feeling of belonging. He had thought he belonged in the Garrison, with its regimented structure and a clear path for him to follow. But it had taken the uninvited appearance of Shiro into his life to realise that that was not the case either.

  
How to define 'home'? Somewhere he felt safe, welcomed, among friends. Among family, no matter that they were not tied by blood. He could count on one hand the amount of places he had felt that way. No, in fact, he could count on one finger.

  
The castle.

  
He was a paladin of Voltron, a member of a team. A pilot. A fighter. He was necessary and loved. Everything he had never known he wanted.

  
Pain sliced through his mind and he screamed, writhing against his bindings. It felt as if a knife had been buried in his skull. Doubt followed immediately on the heels of the sudden and blinding agony, casting shadow across his memory of his companions and hurling mental images his way that he could not block out. The paladins, Coran, Allura - pale and bloody, lying in crumpled heaps across torn and shattered ground. Directly in front of Keith's line of sight, Lance lay on his side and stared at the charred wreck of the Altean castle-ship with eyes that no longer saw.

  
Emotions warred within Keith until he wanted to reach inside his own mind and pull them out. He wanted to scream, to run to his friends, to shake them and cry and plead for them to survive no matter how clearly he could see that they were gone. But a new emotion forced his horror aside, swamping him in a burning sensation of triumph. They had deserved it. They were not fit to wield the powers of Voltron.

  
Motion behind him, and in the scene that he could no longer decide was real or some surreal dreamscape, he spun around to be greeted by the sight of a familiar silhouette. Belatedly he realised that Shiro had not been among the dead, and the reason soon became clear when his gaze dropped to the crimson smears across the metallic surface of his Galra arm.

  
Instinctively, unwillingly, Keith took a step back, but he didn't know why. Was he scared? No. He was angry.

  
Keith had implicitly trusted Shiro from just a few weeks into a friendship that had started out so awkwardly. That was never cast in doubt. But the Shiro he knew then - had it really only been a year? - was not the same one he flew with as a paladin of Voltron, the epitome of courage and leadership. Keith could see what stirred beneath.

  
He had trusted Takashi Shirogane. But Takashi had been left behind somewhere millions of light years away carrying the hopes and dreams of a thousand future pilots on his shoulders. Shiro remained, and though he was every inch the worthy leader, a subject of awe and inspiration for their fellow paladins, he was not the same man Keith had once known.

  
He laughed bitterly, not knowing if the sound only echoed around him in this bizarre shifting dream-world or if it slipped out from a throat raw from screaming. Neither of them were the same people who had planned so eagerly to explore new heights, to pave the way for humanity to ascend further than ever before. Keith Kogane had only ever been a facade, a shield to help him blend faultlessly in with the people of the planet he had crash-landed on by sheer dumb luck. After all, he was half-Altean. He could transform himself into anything he liked. His human form was simply a screen; one option among countless others.

  
And his other half: Galra. The very monsters he and his fellow paladins had been tasked to defeat. The greatest enemy of the few remaining Alteans.

  
He would have laughed blackly again, but he didn't have the energy any more. A being made up of two races at war, one pushed to the very brink of extinction by the other - a being disguised for nineteen years as a member of the weak and unassuming species the Galra Empire would set its sights on next.

  
Yes, he was angry; rage swam in his veins like molten metal, and he itched to wrench his bindings away and flee. He wanted to hurt Shiro for what he had done - was it real or was it all inside his head? - and for changing into someone Keith did not recognise right before his eyes. He wanted to punish him. He wanted - needed - to hurt the paladins for thinking they could take control of Voltron, a power that did not belong to them. It was not theirs to wield. It was his. His birthright. He was the only true paladin, the one who belonged.

  
No. These thoughts were wrong. He tried to wrestle them away, even as the imagery before him blurred and melted into a haze of blood-red and the smoky orange haze that made up the sky. Blackness seeped in to suffocate him again, and his thoughts fled like birds in every direction. He was losing himself. He tried to pull up the image of his companions' faces in his mind's eye, but they were blank, empty. Their names - what were their names?

  
What was _his_ name?

  
He was not human, and the very foundation of his existence had dropped out beneath him to be replaced by emptiness. He was falling.

  
Galran. Altean.

  
Keith. Kethran.

  
Pilot. Paladin.

  
He was a mess. He was a monster.

  
One last desperate grab for something familiar - Red. His lion. She would hold him steady, reassure him with her presence. She had not betrayed him yet, and she would not now.

  
Silence. She did not answer.

  
He screamed, and fell into inky darkness. His senses closed off, locking him inside his own mind, trapping the words that echoed inside his head.

  
_Destroy the paladins. Claim your birthright. Leave no one alive._

 


	12. Storm

There was rain on this planet - real, clear, perfect rain, falling like crystal droplets from a cloud bank so soft Lance felt as if he could fly up in Blue and touch it like a blanket. His brief excitement at the discovery was quickly replaced with concern - after all, he had no idea what could be in this world's water sources - but immediately on the heels of his worry had come a distinct sense of apathy that clung to him like mist. What did it matter if the rain held poison, if they were only going to die here?

  
A day had passed since Shiro's attack on the younger paladin and Lance had inexplicably found himself unable to contact Allura. When he called into the microphone of his helmet, white noise was his only response. He didn't know if the castle was out of range, if it had lost power, or if something worse had happened. In an attempt not to dwell on the last possiblity, he headed into Blue to see if that improved his signal somehow - he still had no idea of the intricacies of the lions and their complex systems - but had had no luck. Walking further out into the rainforest to see if that made any difference was not an option. He couldn't leave Shiro.

  
After the Black Paladin's botched attempt to cut off his own arm, he had sunk into unconsciousness, leaving the younger man to attempt to clean up his wounds and get them within a closer range of the lions. By some miracle Lance had managed to wake Shiro for long enough to partly assist and partly drag him back to the clearing they had set up a makeshift camp in. The other man was essentially a solid mass of muscle with shoulders twice as wide as Lance's so the younger man could only wonder at where his last reserves of strength had come from, but whatever the answer, he was now well and truly spent. He felt as if he had been shattered and shoved back into a human-shaped mess of emotions, over and over again. Those two words, uttered brokenly through a haze of pain, had fragmented the last of his composure. _I'm dying._

  
Even if the poison Shiro spoke of was a real venom seeping into his veins and there was an antidote out there to counter it, Lance had absolutely no idea where he could access one. He didn't know where he was, for pity's sake. Neither of them had any idea what planet they were trapped on - what galaxy it drifted in. How far away was Earth now? Further than he could comprehend.

  
Lance forced back a sob and, when that didn't work, bit down hard on his own knuckles in a rather painful attempt to stop himself making any noise. His gaze drifted inevitably back to the man lying on the forest floor beside him, face as still and peaceful if he were merely sleeping. He was not. Lance had tried to wake him several times since the one instance in which he had managed to pull him back to the clearing, but hadn't succeeded. All he had come to realise was just how cold Shiro's skin was, and how he trembled beneath Lance's uncertain hands.

  
High above them the two lions loomed in the darkness, metallic structures wreathed in shadow. As still and silent as they were, Lance felt comforted by their presence. What he and Blue could do if anything untoward occurred here he had no idea, especially with the extra task of protecting Shiro, but he felt more secure with the lions' lamplight yellow eyes staring out into the night. If only Black could provide a solution to this mess, to help her pilot in some way. Would Blue do the same for Lance? He didn't know, but for Shiro's lion to sit so still and stoic while her paladin lay shaking and unconscious on the rocky ground did not sit right with him.

  
_It's just a robot. A machine. Stop overthinking things._

  
He couldn't simply stop, though. The lions had proven themselves to be, at least to some degree, sentient - both in battles and otherwise. Green and Black had protected Pidge and Shiro of their own accord when the Robeast attacked. Hunk could often be found leaning against Yellow's metal flank while he worked on new recipe ideas, and Lance was sure he had heard the great beast making a peculiar sound that could be described as a purr. And Red - well, Red may have been the last lion to be found but it had proven it possessed its own mind from the start. Keith needed to gain its trust before he could pilot it. If that wasn't evidence of sentience, what was?

  
Did Black truly belong to Zarkon? Was Shiro right - had he never been the Black Paladin at all?

  
Lance exhaled slowly and looked up at the nebulous arcs above, staining the dark sky like a spray of glitter dust. The rain continued in a soft patter; though he had sheltered the two of them beneath a canopy of broad trees, his hair and clothes were dampening by the second, and Shiro was still trembling. An insidious voice in the back of Lance's mind told him it didn't matter if Shiro caught a chill if he was going to die anyway; but he was going to keep him alive until there was no breath in his own body to do so. The last vestiges of hope were all he had left. The Galra had taken everything else. They would not take those too.

  
"Come on, buddy," he murmured, reaching over to shake the other man's shoulder. "We should get inside Blue. She can shelter us."

  
There was no response beyond the faintest incomprehensible murmur and a shiver. Shiro's face was almost as white as the shock of hair that fell across it, his scar standing out like a fresh wound along with the cuts and bruises of his descent when they first landed here. Lance had washed away the blood of yesterday with a rudimentary combination of rainwater and yet another strip of his shirt, which had now definitely been reduced to a crop top. Pidge and Hunk would cry with laughter when they saw it. Perhaps Keith too. Or maybe he would just be jealous of how fantastic Lance's stomach looked. Yeah, that was more like it. Lance sniffled and wiped his hand roughly across his eyes. When he opened them again, Shiro stared back.

  
Lance gaped, opened his mouth, then closed it again when nothing came out. This was not Shiro. The eyes that met his own had transformed from deep grey to yellow - not the warm lamplight yellow of the lions' gazes but a sickly, nacreous shade without pupil or iris. Coupled with the blood that still stained his skin where Lance hadn't been able to remove it and the natural sharpness of his features, he looked feral, frightening. Alien.

  
"Sh-Shiro." The name fell from Lance's lips, but the rest of his words died in his throat. His entire body thrummed with the urge to run. A tingling sensation swept across his skin as every hair stood up, the air taking on a peculiar and unnatural feeling as if of a brewing storm.

  
"Lance?"

  
Shiro's voice broke Lance's nerve and the younger man found himself halfway across the clearing before he spun on one foot to see the Black Paladin levering himself up onto one elbow to stare at him. His eyes were grey and perfectly normal, his expression bemused.

  
"Where are you going?"

  
"Uh... I..." Lance hopped awkwardly from foot to foot before clenching his trembling fists hard at his sides and turning back around. He forced a smile onto a face he knew was pale with shock; usually a permanent fixture, but now it felt like one of the hardest things he'd ever done. "Just checking on the lions."

  
"Huh." Shiro did not look convinced, but before he could continue a racking cough took his words away and he doubled over on the ground. Despite himself, Lance instinctively stepped forward to help, but what he could do, he had no idea. When Shiro drew his hand away from his mouth again, its metallic surface was splattered with blood.

  
They looked at one another for a moment. There was a sense of terrible inevitability in Shiro's eyes that Lance knew was mirrored in his own.

  
"Allura and the others are on their way."

  
The lie fell from Lance's lips before he could stop it. The alternative was something he could not consider - he could not admit to himself or to the other paladin that the Castle of Lions could be lost or destroyed.

  
Shiro's eyes widened for a moment in response to Lance's words.

  
"When?" His voice was barely more than a rasp.

  
"Soon. I don't know exactly. But soon."

  
Shiro didn't respond, and an expression that Lance couldn't read flickered across his face. The younger paladin tried to think of something else to say, but there was nothing. Instead, recalling his lie about where he had been headed, he stepped across the clearing with wet leaves slipping beneath his feet and looked up toward the great lions sitting side-by-side above. Truth be told, he didn't even know what 'checking on the lions' could involve other than simply looking at them and ensuring they were still in the same place as before. He was pretty sure Shiro could see right through him anyway, so his little act was ultimately pointless, but turning away from the other man prevented him from seeing the dampness of Lance's eyes.

  
His shoulders slumped, and he turned, gaze drifting warily over Shiro's slumped form before he approached again. The older man appeared to have slipped back into unconsciousness, but if the Galra maintained control over his mind it could all be an act. Lance had no idea how to tell.

  
A loud rumble split the air as he sat down, and for a moment he froze, staring up at the star-dotted expanse above in search of a stormcloud. No - it had been his stomach. How long had it been since he'd last eaten? Presuming time worked in the same way in whichever galaxy they were in now. Well, he didn't seem to have magically transformed into an old man, so he could only hope everything was as it should be. Whatever the situation, for all that his body insisted it needed sustenance, he didn't think he could eat anything even if a heaped plateful of Hunk's best cooking was placed in front of him.

  
The rain thickened to a downpour, the forest around them transforming into a shifting blur of moonlight and shadow accompanied by a deafening cacophany of sound. Rivulets ran down the lions' metal flanks and pooled toward the centre of the small clearing, while Lance found his clothes drenched within seconds. He grabbed his paladin uniform and hurriedly tugged it on, but the feeling of being trapped in wet fabric beneath the tight plates of the uniform felt even worse. With a growl of exasperation he left it on - it provided better protection in the long run, for all that it was uncomfortable now - and resumed his efforts to wake Shiro and drag him back to the lions.

  
"Come on, buddy, I really need you to move. We need to get somewhere warmer and..." Lance's voice trailed off. Warmer and drier. How long had he spent lying in his bunk deep within the castle corridors, staring at the dark expanse beyond the window and wishing for rain? And now it was here, he fought to escape it. If he could, if everything was different, he would dance in it. He'd cheer and cry and revel in the sensation of the cool, clear water running across his skin. It was not Earth rain, but it was the closest he'd seen for weeks. He didn't know if the sight and sensation of it made his heart feel lighter, or sink even further.

  
Shiro did not respond to his desperate pleas, and Lance found himself unable to continue. He tried to tell himself that he was simply tired, and that deep down he knew there was no use in trying because Shiro was too deep into this toxic stupor to even realise he was there. But that was not the reason. He was scared. He was frightened of the man who had once represented everything the Voltron paladins had stood for, and who had turned into a stranger right before his eyes.

  
Lance swept a hand across his face and turned away again, the steady beat of the rain continuing like a drum all around him, like the heart of this mysterious and beautiful planet whose name he would never know. He wanted to run away - to where, he didn't know, because nowhere was safe any more.

  
_I just want it all to be over._

  
This was not the Lance everyone knew, and he was well aware that if Hunk and Pidge were here they would berate him ceaselessly until his infectious grin bounced back. Perhaps even Keith would try to encourage a smile out of him, though it was hard to believe when he seemed to find it difficult to muster one himself. Allura would order him to pull himself together, and Coran would hover on the sidelines, cracking a joke, but unable to hide the concern in his eyes. Any other time, Lance would be the centre of attention, the one to encourage laughter and noise among the rest of the team, driving Shiro and Allura to distraction and only making Hunk and Pidge's terrible behaviour worse. But now, that part of him felt like nothing more than a memory. A conscious effort - a facade.

  
His stomach rumbled again, and he wrapped his arms around himself morosely. Even if there was anything in this forest that looked remotely edible, he wasn't going to risk trying to eat it. Shiro would probably know exactly where to look, what signs to search for.

  
The sound continued, and Lance frowned. He poked at his stomach as if to make it stop, then raised his head as his hand fell back to the forest floor. The noise hovered without pause on the edge of his hearing, forming a constant, thrumming roar that grew louder by the second. That was definitely not his stomach, or any other part of his body. The lions? His gaze flew up to the beasts above, gleaming in the moonlight and drenched with rain. Their yellow eyes stared unblinking out into the night. No - not them. Maybe-

  
Lance jumped and took a step back as Blue suddenly raised her head and swung toward the east - or what he presumed was the east. Her gaze locked on a point far above, a space between the stars that Lance's weak human eyesight could not work out. He stared, frozen to the ground, fists clenched at his sides. He was shaking.

  
After a moment, Black moved too, raising her great head to look in the same direction as Blue. The wariness that sent tension into every inch of Blue's metallic frame did not seem to be present in the larger lion's. Lance watched, barely daring to breathe, fighting the urge to step back and flee into the forest. He couldn't abandon Shiro, yet he didn't know what the response of the Voltron lions meant. Danger? Rescue? As much as he tried to deny it to himself, Lance knew deep down that the only one he trusted in this rain-soaked, darkened clearing was his own lion. Warm, faithful Blue, who would do everything in her power to defend him. He prayed those she needed to defend him from would not turn out to be those he had once fought alongside.

  
A bloom of fire lit up the sky and Lance cried out, instinctively darting back several paces. Blue shifted position, planting all four feet firmly into the earth; Black and Shiro did not move. The sky looked like a black void between the ragged shapes of shifting clouds, a void that could wrench a gravity field apart and pull him into space. Lance clenched his teeth and prayed to every deity he knew of whether he believed in them or not, knowing that out here a million miles from anywhere there was no help to be found.

  
The object above broke through the atmosphere in a blaze of white; a burning tail arced behind it as it streaked across its nebulous backdrop, elongating and writhing like a living thing. Lance stared and trembled and tried to control his breathing. With every second what he had suspected to be a meteor looked less and less like one. Not a ship either. Something fluid and graceful and almost feline.

  
Something like a lion.

  
There was no denying that the object was headed directly for their location, but Lance had been too intent on trying to work out what it was to realise this. As its blazing shape filled the sky, its trail burning into his vision, he let out a curse and spun round. There wasn't time to get to Blue, and he needed to protect Shiro. He couldn't do both. He had been too busy staring. What an idiot. What an absolute stupid idiot-

  
The crackle of flames, the roar of a dozen trees felled in a nanosecond and a rending screech of metal; Lance stumbled as the ground shook and debris flew in every direction. His world was flickering shadows and fire. Something bounced off the back of his head - metal? A tree branch? - and he was sure it drew blood but there was no time to check, no time to worry about anything but reaching the other paladin and getting the hell out of here.

  
The ground shook and Lance's legs flew from beneath him. He landed hard, and his lingering concussion sent the forest floor beneath him into a spin as if he was sitting inside a washing machine. He retched, pushed back the urge to be sick with a will he didn't know he possessed, and with one desperate surge of motion he threw himself over Shiro's motionless form.

  
The shockwave that enveloped the clearing sent the air rushing from Lance's lungs. His vision darkened; he had passed out, but he didn't know how long for, because when he opened his eyes again with a gasp like a drowning man he was met with the sight of debris still whirling through the air. Dirt marred Shiro's slumped form, and when Lance managed to lift a trembling hand to his face he saw that mud clung to his own skin along with the blood from dozens of stinging lacerations. Blood was good. Blood was a harsh and brutal reminder that he was alive.

  
But how? Lance swung over onto an elbow, feeling the bite of tree roots digging into his arm, and stared up at the enormous metallic shape above him.

  
Blue. The lion's body was curved overhead, tail curled around the two paladins, her silvery plating running with mud and rainwater. Smoke swirled around the broken stumps of felled trees, the only sounds the hiss of hydraulics and the whisper of the downpour.

  
Slowly, Lance turned over and clambered to his feet, gaze darting around the clearing. Between Blue's legs, another pair of enormous claws was visible. Black? No. The plating between the powerful joints was a combination of silver, black and deep red, broken only by the cyan glow of the beast's accent lights. Lance's eyes widened, and his knees gave way. He crawled forward, ignoring Blue's protesting growl and the huge paw with which she tried to block his way, ignoring the blood that ran from the cuts in his hands and the tears that formed in his paladin uniform as rocks and tree roots tore at his limbs. He needed to see. He needed to set his eyes on that enormous creature and the pilot that controlled her, to convince himself it wasn't all a fever dream.

  
The Red Lion leant on her front paws with her head resting on the ground. As Lance broke through the gap between Blue's paws and leant on his own lion to steady himself, Red's mouth dropped slowly open and the cockpit's cool light spread across the clearing. Lance's eyes watered from the glare, but he couldn't look away.

  
A figure stepped forward, a slender silhouette against the blinding glow. Shorter than Lance but wiry, a fraction broader. A short jacket, jeans, tall boots and that stupid, ridiculous mullet that he had never been so glad to see.

  
Keith stepped forward, and the smile that had bounced onto Lance's face vanished as quickly as it had come. Coldness swept through his frame. _No. No, this is all some terrible dream. I'm hallucinating. The poison's got me too-_

  
Keith's high cheekbones, the narrow jaw, the sharp eyebrows and the shape of his eyes were all the same. But there was no scowl, no sardonic raise of the brows. There was nothing, and now Lance stood so close, he didn't know if he was looking at the Red Paladin at all.

  
Skin once moon-pale was deep violet with unmistakable wisps of fur around the cheeks, sweeping upward to pointed ears protruding from hair that had changed from inky black to pure white. No pupil, iris or sclera was visible in nacreous yellow eyes the same as those Lance had found himself staring into earlier when he looked into the battered and exhausted face of the Black Paladin. As he stared, his gaze leaping from feature to unrecognisable feature, his mind buzzed with questions that he had no answer to. When his eyes dropped to the crimson arrowhead shapes sweeping across Keith's cheekbones, the same as those upon the faces of their Altean companions, he wanted to turn and run away until he reached the end of this terrible dream and emerge back into a world that made sense.

  
Silence descended upon the clearing, Lance's gaze locking onto the other paladin's. At least, he thought Keith looked at him. With eyes that glowed like miniature suns, it was impossible to tell.

  
It was a long time before Lance could find his voice. He didn't know how long. Perhaps time didn't behave the same way here after all.

  
"Keith? What's happened to you?"

  
Another pause.

  
"Keith?" Lance's voice shook so violently he could barely force the word out.

  
Silence.

  
Keith smiled, and the cockpit's glow reflected from teeth as pointed as his lion's.


	13. Red

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone! Sorry for the delayed update again! I spent last weekend running around a convention in cosplay as Keith (I met several people who have read this fic! Eek!)  
> 

Silence. Terrible, creeping silence, and the sensation that everything within the clearing was leaning in just a little bit closer, the world closing in until the three of them were the only living things left in the universe.

  
Shiro’s laboured breathing was the only thing that overrode the aching quiet, echoing in his ears in a discordant rhythm. The air felt charged, taut, ready to snap at any moment. He leant on one elbow, wincing even at that small movement, and squinted until the formless blur of colours resolved itself into something that was slightly less blurry but didn’t make any more sense.

  
There was Black, a hulking mass of monochrome metal standing high above the treetops. Her head was faced toward the new arrivals and her tail, which so frequently was laid in a loose arc around Shiro in casual protectiveness whenever the paladins stopped to rest, standing upright and alert. He tried not to dwell on what it meant. He told himself it was simply because there were more important issues at hand, but that was not true.

  
Beside Black, Blue crouched with one paw resting in front of the kneeling Lance. Her poise indicated a readiness for fight or flight; Lance looked as if he wasn’t fit to do either. He simply knelt, his arms loose at his sides, his entire body trembling, and stared.

  
Shiro’s gaze lifted to the shape of the third lion, a lithe and agile figure against Black’s enormous frame. Crimson plates of metal stood against shades of grey and the cold blue of her accent lights, casting an icy glow across the white hair of the figure at her feet. He squinted again. Allura? No, too short. Too pale. A shape that was slightly stockier, with a short jacket, high boots and those belt pouches Shiro had teased him for since the moment he bought them. Keith had insisted he wasn’t attempting to copy his friend’s combination of casual and practical in one outfit, but had turned as red as his favourite jacket nonetheless.

  
_No. This doesn’t make any sense._ Shiro tried to lever himself upwards but froze with a hiss of pain as agony lanced through his side. Instinctively his hand fell to the wound but he pulled it away again when even the slightest brush of his fingertips elicited a ferocious burning sensation. Well, fighting was definitely out of the question. He could accept that, if it was a matter of only facing off against Keith - or whatever Keith had become. He didn’t want to hurt him. Wouldn’t hurt him. But he would kill whoever had done this to him. He would rip them apart with his bare hands and he would enjoy it.

  
Shiro flinched, and a sharp breath rushed between his teeth. No. This was not him. Not him. These were not his thoughts.

  
The Galra were taking all of them, one by one.

  
It took him a moment to realise that Lance was speaking. His voice was so faint, trembling so violently that Shiro could barely hear him despite the clearing being uninterrupted by so much as a breath of wind. He was calling Keith’s name.

  
There was no response. Shiro could not see Keith’s expression. He tried to ignore the nagging voice at the back of his head that told him he was fast approaching the end. His sight would be the first thing to go, and his smallest concern by the time the poison had completed its work.

  
Lance spoke again. He asked Keith what had happened, the very words that Shiro wanted to speak but couldn’t seem to force past his throat.

  
Still the Red Paladin did not answer. Above him, his lion remained perfectly still, glowing yellow gaze fixed on the diminutive figure of Lance so far below.

  
Shiro tried to think, running ideas through his mind one after another and coming to dead ends at every turn. The Galra were not capable of altering a person’s physical appearance. That was the exclusive ability of the Alteans - or so Allura had explained. Unless her knowledge was limited - she had been so young when she was thrown into cryo-sleep, after all. Her world had still been so small. And so was his, despite everything, despite the fact that he was the only human still confirmed alive to have walked on the surface of Kerberos while most had never made it off their home planet. He was only twenty-one, for all that he felt he had aged ten years in the last few days. He barely knew anything. The awareness of his own helplessness, his own lack of suitability to lead those who depended so strongly on him, gnawed at him like a physical ache.

  
It was clear that Lance had absolutely no idea what to do. Shiro couldn’t blame him, not when they had trained for so many eventualities and none of them had included being forced to face up against their fellow paladins. Allura and the others were not here, and would perhaps never arrive. He had to take control of the situation, however blind and clueless he was running into it. A weak and bitter laugh left his mouth. ‘Running’ was not exactly the right word. ‘Crawling’ was more like it, if he could even manage that.

  
Ignoring the agony of his injured side, Shiro levered himself up onto one arm, then the other, and pushed himself onto his knees with limbs that shook with the effort. A soft trickling sound broke through the pain, and he glanced down to see spots of crimson dotting the rocky ground. A moment later, the sensation of warm blood running from the corner of his mouth followed on its heels. Why he had not noticed before? His senses felt as if they were jumbled, as if he had been pulled apart and put back together again with little care. _Well,_ he considered, feeling the corner of his mouth turning up in an expression that could have been a smile under different circumstances, _it’s not that far from the truth._

  
Dizziness crept up on him as he made to stand up, as he had expected; he swept the blood roughly from his mouth with the back of one hand but it kept coming. The taste of metal was strong on his tongue and he fought the urge to be sick. His entire body was shaking as if every virus he had ever had in his younger years had returned to haunt him, but Lance was looking back at him with desperation and pure, unfiltered terror in his face and the expression brought a tightness to Shiro’s chest that hurt almost as much as the wound that was killing him. He had to do something, for those who depended on him to protect them. Even if it was the last thing he ever did. He gripped a rocky outcrop in the clearing’s shallow bank for balance, and heaved himself to his feet.

  
A sharp crack split the air. Shiro screamed, or he thought he screamed, because he couldn’t hear anything and suddenly his entire body didn’t seem to be working anyway. All senses fell to darkness for a split-second before the world rushed back in with all the painfully vibrant colours of the nebulous sky above. And _pain._

  
Pain, for a long time, had felt like the only thing Shiro knew, the only thing he understood. It meant he was still alive to fight another day, however terrible the thought, however much he wanted to curl up and disappear. He had to survive, for Matt, for Samuel, for his family, for Keith who he had left so many miles behind him.

  
Now, the pain meant exactly the opposite.

  
Shiro didn’t bother to check whether the blast had hit bone, muscle, artery. He was finished anyway. He lay sprawled and dazed with the sharp edges of scattered rocks digging into his back as the world spun above. All sound had dulled, but beneath the rushing roar of his blood in his ears, he could hear Lance crying, screaming, pleading for him to be OK.

  
Keith did not cry.

  
“What the hell are you doing? What’s wrong with you?” Lance’s voice had fallen into a near-nonsensical stream of syllables, punctuated by gasping sobs. “You’re not Keith! _You’re not Keith!”_

  
Shiro tried to speak, but nothing came out. He drew in a breath that felt like needles in his lungs and tried again. “Black.”

  
No response.

  
“Black, please help me.”

  
He had never had to ask - should never have to. She had always instinctively known where her paladin needed her, leaping to his defense in an instant. She understood, a fraction before he did, when they needed to form Voltron and when it was be more advantageous to work alone. She had told him what she could do, what she was capable of, even though he could never unlock her full potential because he didn’t have the bayard. He had always felt guilty, because he wasn’t worthy of her and the position that piloting her represented. Now, finally, she had realised it too. What it had taken for her to do so, he didn’t know. Was it from when Zarkon had taken over, when Shiro had been rejected from his own lion in the middle of a battle, or had their connection been shattered long before that and he had simply been lying to himself for weeks? He didn’t know. He didn’t know anything any more.

  
“Shiro, please answer me!”

  
Lance’s voice broke into his thoughts and it took him a moment to realise he was still alive. A poor shot from Keith, who was not Keith. Or an intentional miss? Scare tactics? There was no time to figure it out. Lance needed him.

  
Shiro braced himself for a second before forcing himself upright. The world swayed, the galaxies blurring into a whirling vortex above; he focused hard on the rocky earth beneath him, on whatever it took to ground him, and used every scattered remnant of willpower he possessed to make it to his feet. He was dying even as he walked, but there was one last task left to complete. Shiro spat another mouthful of blood and began to make his slow and painful way across the clearing on legs that felt like lead and like mist all at once. There was nothing left of him any more.

  
The entire time, Keith watched him with eyes that no longer possessed pupils, sclera, or any trace of emotion. What did he want? What was he waiting for?

  
“Lance. Get to Blue.”

  
The younger paladin stared at him, fists clenched at his sides, eyes wide with incomprehension.

  
“Get to Blue _now!”_ The words ended in a hacking cough and the sound seemed to jolt Lance to his senses.

  
“No. I can’t. I won’t!”

  
“You have to. If you have any respect for me as your leader, you’ll do as I say.” It was a cheap tactic, and he felt ashamed for using it, but it was probably the only thing he had left at this point.

  
“Do as he says.”

  
Lance, who had opened his mouth to argue again, snapped his jaw closed and spun to look Keith’s way. Shiro, too, could only stare. Somehow, he had expected - no, he had hoped - that the other man would not sound as they had always known him. That Keith would not sound like Keith, that it would be obvious from the moment he opened his mouth that something else lingered and watched from behind his eyes and controlled his every movement.

  
But no, that was Keith’s voice, deeper than Lance’s and sharp around the edges as if in a perpetual state of wariness, ready for fight or flight at any moment. It had softened over the weeks he had spent with the other paladins on the castle-ship; he had begun, slowly and steadily, to relax. More often than not, there was a smile on his face. Now, that smile was only a memory. Shiro wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what.

Somehow, deep down, he already knew Keith was lost to him. He had slipped through his fingers - not since he returned from Kerberos, but long before that. When the world grew to discover that the Garrison’s favourite pilot had caused the worst deep-space disaster in decades, had killed himself and taken everyone else on board with him. Takashi Shirogane had died that day. He knew it, and he knew that Keith saw it too. And here, now, stood someone that wore Keith’s skin but behind his eyes the man Shiro had known was not there any more. They were one and the same, for all that their physical appearances were so vastly and shockingly different. A mirror image in a shattered frame.

  
“What do you want?” Lance demanded, voice shaking through chattering teeth. The rain persisted, streaming across the younger paladin’s uniform and slicking Shiro’s hair down to his forehead. But he knew Lance’s trembling was not from the cold.

  
Keith studied Lance with mild interest, as if he was attempting to identify an object that had got stuck to his shoe. Shiro watched him, trying and failing to reconcile his friend of what amounted to two years but felt like a lifetime with the figure that stood before them. Keith’s once-black hair was pure white, a reflection of the trauma that had taken physical form in Shiro’s own hair; indigo eyes were now emotionless pools of yellow, and his skin was a deep purple to match the fur that swept across long pointed ears. Below each glowing eye, a mark stood out against his sharp cheekbones; a twin set of crimson arrowheads. Shiro stared, and then squinted as his vision blurred and betrayed him, but no, he was not imagining the marks that matched those Allura and Coran bore. Marks that identified the owner as a citizen of Altea.

  
“Keith. What did they do to you?”

  
The words fell from his lips before he was ready for them to, a rush of air that was stunted by his laboured breaths and choked by blood. Keith moved before Shiro’s brain had time to catch up, and his foot connected with the taller man’s jaw so hard he was knocked clean off his feet. This time, when he landed, his body would not obey him; he was spent, and he simply lay in the dirt while Lance launched himself at the other paladin. A roar split the air, broke through the treetops and send birds screaming from their nests, but he didn’t know if it was Blue, Red or Black. A flurry of motion ensued above him, but he couldn’t make sense of it. It was so much easier to simply close his eyes.

  
It took some time for him to realised he had blacked out. How long, he didn’t know. Seconds? Minutes? When he managed to force his eyes open again, he was greeted by the sight of a sky that, thankfully, stayed exactly where it should be. It blurred, but it didn’t spin. That was good. Shiro coughed, and had to turn his head and allow the blood to trickle out of his mouth and onto the ground so he didn’t choke on it. That wasn’t quite so good.

  
The silence was unnerving. When he tried to turn over onto his front, his body trembled so badly he could barely manage it. His right arm was hot; the leaves beneath its metallic surface had started to curl up and emit a burning smell before he realised just how heated it had become. It felt as if his entire body had turned against him, just when he felt as if he had resumed control after a year of having every decision made for him. Shiro gritted his teeth against the sensation of tears pricking at the backs of his eyes. This was not the time to break down. There was never a good time to break down.

  
When he managed to focus his gaze enough to make sense of his surroundings again, he saw that Black had moved. She stood beside Red, frame taut and head raised toward the sky. The lions could not convey emotion in their faces, but he could usually sense some vague hint of something that could be construed as positivity, negativity, fondness, anger. He didn’t know if it was the case for all the paladins, but he assumed so. Now, he felt nothing.

  
Keith and Lance stood several metres away in what at first glance could have appeared to be an embrace - if romantic embraces involved a knife being held to the neck of one party while the other smiled.

  
Shiro’s fingers clenched in the dirt, but he could do nothing. Beneath his metallic arm, the leaves continued to burn. Curls of smoke clouded his vision to combine with the poison’s slow destruction.

  
“Keith. Stop.” The words were so weak they were barely audible. He tried again, but nothing came out at all. _Damn it all._ He had never been so helpless - not even as a Galra prisoner. No. Perhaps he could have laughed darkly if he had the energy. Of course he was not helpless as a Galra prisoner - he was the Champion, modified and brutalised until he was everything they wanted him to be. A killing machine with the face of the Garrison’s favourite poster boy. He didn’t know how, but they had done the same to Keith - ripped away everything he had once been and left a monstrosity in his place that walked with his stride and talked with his voice. And here lay Shiro, sprawled in the dirt, bruised and bloodied and unable to do a thing but watch him kill the man he had so slowly and hesitantly built a friendship with since they began to fight side-by-side.

  
“It’s only temporary, don’t worry,” Keith was saying, his voice as calm as if he were reading off a shopping list. Lance, his back to the Red Paladin, stared out into the night with eyes wide and sweat trickling down his face. “I just need you to take Blue back up to the ship. Unfortunately I can’t control two lions myself - Black will be fine on her own, but I have a feeling Blue will require some work.”

  
“Blue will never work for the Galra,” Lance spat, and Shiro wanted desperately to tell him to stop.

  
“We’ll see.”

  
Shiro’s gaze drifted from the two men before him to movement in the corner of his eye. A set of cyan lights, far above, punctuating the darkened sky. It couldn’t be. He was hallucinating.

  
_Yes. It is._ Shiro only realised he had stopped breathing when his lungs began to burn. It was the castle-ship.

  
Lance spotted it a moment after Shiro, and the sudden motion as his head snapped around to focus on the sky made Keith flinch. Hope and terror collided as one until Shiro felt as if he was being torn in two. Allura would not reach them in time - all of this, and it had come to nothing.

  
“Are you going to cooperate or not?” Keith snarled, and now his voice was no longer the voice they had known from weeks of working together. Beneath its surface lay a snarl that did not belong to a human; but that was not a human face, and those were not human teeth that he spat the words between.

  
“Hell, no!” Lance spun, and his fist swung toward Keith’s face, and Shiro could see it before it happened; the splatter of blood, the grunt of shock, the smile on Keith’s face as he murdered his fellow paladin with no remorse.

  
Shiro didn’t know where his last reserve of energy came from; it could have been his own adrenaline, or it could have been artificial. Perhaps it came from the Galra arm, lending him its mechanical strength. In that moment, he didn’t care. His feet skidded on the rocky ground, the world dissolved into a blur and the pain hit until he felt as if he was falling apart. But it didn’t matter, because Lance was out of the way, he was lying in a tangled heap on the ground and was staring in pure unmasked horror but it didn’t matter because he was safe.

  
Silence fell, broken only by the rumble of the castle’s engines high above. Keith looked at Shiro, really looked at him, with eyes that shone like miniature suns. It was impossible to read his expression, and Shiro did not try. It didn’t matter now anyway.

  
Allura could save Lance. Keith… perhaps Keith could not be saved, and that hurt. Stars above, did that hurt. But he had tried. He had tried _so hard._

  
After a moment, Keith’s gaze dropped, and so did Shiro’s, to the knife that he had always so wondered about. It was a curious weapon, always neatly wrapped as if to preserve a secret that lay inside. Shiro had never seen the blade until now, and he had caught only the barest glimpse of it. It didn’t matter. He told himself it didn’t matter. He looked back at Keith, and he managed the weakest of smiles even as blood trailed from his lips, because he didn’t want his last memory of him to be a sad one. Because it was him, deep down somewhere in there, he knew. The Red Paladin. The fiery and ferocious and brutally honest soul who had made him feel so alive when he felt his life had devolved into nothing more than coldness and routine.

  
It was Keith.

  
Keith’s eyes, and Keith’s heart, and Keith’s hands gripping the knife that was buried up to its hilt between Shiro’s ribs.


	14. Strike

The castle-ship broke through the planet’s atmosphere in a burst of light, descending toward the tangled forest below with engines roaring. For Allura, it wasn’t fast enough. She stood at the control panel with knuckles white on the keys, unable to tear her gaze from the creatures below. Enormous beasts she had fought alongside dozens of times before and never felt a shred of fear. Now, she dreaded what she might find.

  
Behind her, Coran stood following her gaze with an expression of growing concern. Pidge and Hunk hovered nearby, poised to run to their lions at any moment. After Allura had passed on the panicked call she received from Lance, they had been torn; it was impossible to know what to expect once they reached the ground. They had lost contact completely after that call, due to a temporary blip in the castle’s power. Allura had not been able to return to full strength yet and she could still feel a weakness seeping through her bones, making her head cloudy and her limbs weak. She shook her head firmly. She had time to rest later - when all this was over. However it ended.

  
“Allura.” Coran’s voice was strained. “That’s… that’s Red down there.”

  
“What?” She looked, and then stared, leaning forward as far as she could without letting go of the controls. “Keith is alive?”

  
“He made it back. He’s OK.” Hunk let out an explosive sigh of relief and had to grip onto a seat before his legs gave way with relief. Pidge said nothing, her gaze fixed unblinkingly on the scene below.

  
As they descended, the figures below appeared less like toys and formed themselves into shapes that began to make more sense. The mass of green forest split into winding branches, black lakes capped with glittering white beneath the moonlight, tangled pathways and rocky cliffs. Allura focused on the three lions, the three figures at their feet. The blood upon the ground.

  
“Something’s wrong.”

  
“Princess, what do you-” Coran’s voice was cut off in a yell of surprise as Allura angled the ship sharply to the left and blasted forward to aim for a clear patch of land beside the lions. An enormous ripple spread across the canopy of the forest as the downdraft from the descending ship sent leaves and branches flying through the air. Below, the lions let out bellowing roars - whether they were of relief or surprise or rage, Allura couldn’t tell.

  
The castle touched down with a rumble that shook the earth and Allura slammed her hand down on the door controls. The hatch opened, slowly, painfully slowly. She sprinted forward, leaping across it before it touched the ground - damn, she should have changed out of her dress, but she had been expecting a nice, calm, perfectly normal reunion - and spun to face the scene before her.

  
Red and Black stood side-by-side amid the whirling debris from the castle’s landing, facing Blue, who crouched protectively over the sprawled form at her feet. Her tail whipped to and fro, striking furrows into the ground with each hit, rumbling growls erupting from her throat like a building storm. Red snarled back, poised to strike, but Black seemed remarkably unconcerned with the events unfolding before her - as if she was waiting for something. Waiting for what? Allura’s gaze dropped, and she stumbled back in horror. In the same moment, she heard the scuffle of footsteps behind her and a twin set of alarmed cries.

  
Shiro stood with his back to them, his paladin uniform torn to shreds in places, his skin marred with blood both old and new. For a brief, blissful moment, he remained there, and Allura managed in some deep desperate part of her mind to convince herself that he was going to turn around at any second and greet his fellow paladins with a smile that told them everything would be alright. But then he stumbled, and his legs gave way, and as if in slow motion he crumpled silently to the ground.

  
Blood. There was so much blood.

  
Allura blinked, stared, tried to scream and couldn’t. Keith stood where Shiro had been, except it wasn’t Keith, it was some terrible macabre imposter which only shared the barest similarities with him because Keith didn’t have white hair and pointed ears and yellow eyes that watched with no reaction as his teammate collapsed to the ground.

  
Lance was crying, and Allura couldn’t blame him for a second even as her gaze flew feverishly to and fro, piecing together the scene. There was a cut in Lance’s neck, long but shallow - stars, Keith had tried to _kill_ Lance, and Shiro had leapt forward and shoved him out of the way just in time for-

  
For Keith to bury the knife in Shiro’s chest instead.

  
“Shiro!”

  
It was Hunk, voice escaping him in a rush of air as if he had been holding it since the moment they arrived. Allura felt light-headed; had she been doing the same? She didn’t know. Everything was chaos, true chaos that she hadn’t experienced since the moment her father pushed her into that cryo-pod and told her that everything was going to be fine, _you’re safe, I’ll see you soon, sweetheart-_

  
She shook her head, forced the memories back, and clenched her fists. It didn’t matter how they had got here. What mattered was how they stopped it.

  
“Coran, Hunk, get Shiro to the med bay!” she ordered, gaze snapping up to meet Keith’s.

  
“But Princess, I think he’s already-”

  
“I said get Shiro to the med bay!”

  
She wouldn’t consider that possibility. _Couldn’t_ consider it.

  
“Pidge, go to your lion.”

  
There was no rush of fleeing footsteps, and Allura turned to see that Pidge had not moved. The younger girl stood with fists clenched, trembling from head to foot, and eyes aflame.

  
“Pidge, go to-”

  
“I heard you. I’m not going.”

  
“But you need to-”

  
A gunshot split the air and Allura screamed. Someone else screamed, too, but she didn’t know who. The ground near Coran’s feet was smouldering, a lazy swirl of smoke drifting into the air, and in the heat haze beyond the space where the blast landed stood Keith with a Galra weapon in his hands.

  
“Here’s an idea,” he said, and Allura felt a tremor run through her at how perfectly, innocuously _like Keith_ he sounded. “You hand over the lions, then you can take the Champion to your med bay. Think it’s too late, personally, but that’s not my concern.” He shrugged, the first semblance of an expression appearing on a face that was his and yet nothing like him at all. Was that nonchalance? Boredom?

  
“Keith, what did they do to you?” Allura demanded, letting out a yell when he fired again. She dropped to the ground and the energy blast hit the castle-ship’s thrusters with a sizzling roar of melting metal. Coran started to run toward her, his concern for the paladins clear but his loyalty always with his princess, but Keith halted him by swinging the gun his way.

  
“Don’t move, Coran. Nobody move,” Allura said through gritted teeth. Slowly, on trembling limbs, she got to her feet and pushed her hair out of her face. Keith watched her impassively, the gun still trained on her companions.

  
“I’ll ask one more time, then I’ll stop being nice,” he said calmly. “I didn’t really want to waste ammo destroying half this planet, but I guess I might have to. I’m taking the lions to the Galra - that’s non-negotiable. What’s negotiable is if you still want to be walking around and breathing by the time we’re done.”

  
“What have they done to you, Keith?” Allura cried, taking a step forward; she froze when he swung the gun back in her direction. She faltered, then pressed on. Surely, _surely,_ if he was going to shoot her, he would have done it by now. Behind those emotionless eyes, Keith still had to be there. “Who have they told you that you are?”

  
“That’s none of your concern.”

  
“It doesn’t matter, Keith!” It was Lance, scrambling to his feet, tears and dirt and blood streaked across his face. “It doesn’t matter what you are! I don’t care if you’re Galran or Altean or - or whatever! You’re Keith - you’re one of us.”

  
Another energy blast split the night, the clearing, for a moment, bleached into monochrome. The three paladins standing, frozen; the princess and her companion, torn between two paths; the motionless figure of Shiro on the ground. The monstrous, looming shapes of the lions and the person who had once been Keith.

  
For a moment, Allura was convinced that she might open her eyes to see Lance lying sprawled and still like Shiro, but he was still standing, staring in horror at the crater in the ground where he had been just a second before.

  
“Last chance,” Keith said, his voice very quiet and utterly glacial. “Give me your bayards.”

  
Lance’s gaze flickered between the man before him and the enormous shape of his lion above. Blue let out a soft, rumbling growl and curled her tail more closely around her pilot. Red pawed the ground impatiently, clearly itching for a fight. Allura had always known that Red was the more impulsive lion, prone to following her own path, allowing herself to be ruled by her temper and her heart - just like her paladin. But Red had never wanted to fight simply to fight. That was not what Voltron stood for. It was not what the paladins stood for.

  
Black stood silently beside Red, and did nothing, even while her pilot lay on the churned earth with a knife in his chest.

  
“We have to do it,” Hunk said, and Allura was so surprised to hear his voice that she spun around in alarm. She had almost forgotten that he and Pidge were there, but there they stood, fists clenched and bodies trembling and expressions as frightened as her own.

  
“What are you talking about?” she demanded breathlessly.

  
He met her gaze with earnest eyes. “We have to hand over the lions.” His voice broke on the last word, and in the vibrant moonlight, she could see the tears that sprang to his eyes.

  
In a dim, distant part of her mind, Allura was glad - bizarrely, cruelly glad - that the paladins had had this reaction to being asked to hand over their lions. When they had first arrived on Arus, when she had been awoken from her cryo-sleep and told them of the duties and responsibility that lay ahead of them, she had for a while believed that they would be no use at all. They wouldn’t pay attention in training, they were constantly distracted by food or gadgets or whatever else they could find, they bickered like children and almost drove her to pulling her hair out in frustration. But so much had changed. They learnt to work together for a common goal, to put aside differences in background and beliefs, to put their trust so completely in one another’s hands and in their lions. She had, once, believed she had made an enormous mistake. But she could see it now. She hadn’t. They were perfect. They were her paladins, her family, and she loved them.

  
And they had a choice to make.

  
Allura opened her mouth to speak, but Pidge spoke over her.

  
“He’s already dead, so it doesn’t matter. You’re not having the lions.”

  
Her gaze was focused unflinchingly on Keith, her expression schooled into one of completely neutrality. There was nothing of the turmoil she was inevitably feeling inside making it onto her face. Keith simply stared at her for a moment. Allura’s gaze slid sideways to Shiro, at the same moment that everyone else’s did.

  
Blood still dripped sluggishly from the wound where the knife Keith had always protected so fiercely was buried between the other man’s ribs. His face was hidden behind his hair, his skin ashen in the wan glow of the moon, his chest perfectly still.

  
Allura’s fists clenched. Stars, he was dead. He was _dead._

  
And still Black did nothing.

  
“Like I said. Dead. Too late.” Pidge shrugged. “You’ve lost your bargaining chip.”

  
Keith seemed to falter for a split-second, and Allura tried not to let herself believe it might be the true Red Paladin fighting for freedom beneath the facade, not just a struggle to recover his composure of earlier. Then his expression hardened again.

  
“No matter. I’m pretty sure you’d rather hand over your bayards than be dead.”

  
“You’d be surprised-” Pidge began, but Lance spoke over her.

  
“You’re right. You’re right.” His voice was trembling so hard his words were barely audible. He reached for his belt with a shaking hand; Blue craned her neck to look down at him with a puzzled growl.

  
“Lance, what are you-” Allura’s frantic hiss was cut off as Coran coughed. She glanced sidelong at him, and he raised his eyebrows fractionally. _Don’t be rash._

  
_It’s all very well putting our trust in Lance, but his plans don’t have a history of going as expected. And if it doesn’t work, what can we do? What can we do, faced with a Galra weapon and two lions who no longer recognise us as allies?_

  
_We’ve lost._

  
“It’s OK, Blue. It’s alright. We’ll all be alright.” Lance reached up to pat the lion’s metallic jaw with bloodstained fingers. “Just… please do as Keith tells you. It’s best for all of us.”

  
She let out a soft rumbling sound, nuzzled his hand and then finally withdrew. Lance looked toward Keith, and held out his bayard in one palm.

  
“Here. It’s all yours. And so is everyone else’s - on the condition that you’ll spare us.” He turned to look toward his companions - a risky move, when Keith could take him out with one strike, but if nothing else they needed a reason, a thousand reasons, to make him think he could trust them. “Right, guys?"

  
A pause.

  
“Yes,” Hunk said, grabbing his own bayard from his belt and holding it out. The device was dwarfed in his enormous hands. “Absolutely.”

  
“And mine,” Pidge said, a few seconds later. Her gaze was hidden behind the glare of moonlight on her glasses and a sweep of brown hair. She pulled her bayard from her belt and held it out to Keith. “Take mine, too. Just keep your promise.”

  
Keith looked between them all for a long moment. Allura counted five ticks, somehow at once passing in an instant and crawling by for a millennium.

  
“Fine.”

  
He reached for Lance’s bayard.

  
The instant his fingers touched the metal the other man lunged. A fist flew for Keith’s face and his roar of rage melded with Red’s snarl, the scramble of metal claws on the forest floor as Blue leapt into action, Pidge’s angry cries and the sizzling rush of activating bayards. The air was full of light and noise. Somewhere amid the chaos, Lance brought Keith down with a strike to the face. Jaws snapped closed, trees cracked in half by swinging tails and gleaming claws. Above it all, Black’s wings spread to block out the sky.

  
Damn, Allura wished she had a weapon - she didn’t have a weapon, nothing but the castle itself which sat grounded and useless - but at the same time she didn’t know if she could turn a force of destruction on one of her own. Frightened, angry, torn in every direction at once, she made to rush forward, but Coran’s sudden grip on her arm made her stumble to a halt.

  
The chaos broke like a supernova, imploded to a splintered quiet between gasping breaths, muffled snarls, the clatter of broken branches falling to the ground. Black loomed over the clearing, wings spread, teeth bared, eyes like suns in the darkness. Red and Blue stood locked together in some sort of brutal dance, neither able to overpower the other, mirroring their paladins below. Lance crouched on top of Keith, his hands gripped around the other man’s arms as Keith’s hands encircled his throat. The Galra gun and bayard lay abandoned on the shattered ground. They shook, and stared at one another, hair matted with sweat and hands stained with blood. They were equal, each unable to overpower the other.

  
Lance took a deep breath, licked his lips.

  
“Keith.”

  
Allura didn’t know what he planned to say; a command, an encouragement, a plea. Lance’s voice seemed to jolt Keith back to life, and his hand shot out, quicker than a snake, quicker than any human, and snatched the gun from the ground.

  
A shot broke the air, and above, a flock of colourful birds took off into the night.


	15. Pieces

Vaguely, somewhere deep in the back of his mind, Keith could recall the first time he had met Lance. He had denied all knowledge of the other man’s existence when they had encountered one another in their own - perhaps foolish - attempts to rescue Shiro from the Garrison’s interrogation chambers, because in the spur of the moment he had completely blanked their initial meeting. But now that he thought about it, really thought, he could recall seeing that lanky frame and quirked brow and stupid grin before.

  
Keith never took the time to get to know his classmates at the Garrison, not after the first fumbling attempts had ended with him wishing he hadn’t bothered in the first place. He had never remained in one place long enough growing up to learn how to reach out and form friendships, and then there was the issue of maintaining them. It was like some sort of complicated dance he didn’t know the steps to, or a song he couldn’t sing because he hadn’t understood the words. So it was safer, and easier, not to try at all. The people he met, whether school friends or teachers or fellow cadets, would never remain in his life for long anyway, only ever just passing through. Sometimes, he felt like a rock sitting in the middle of a fast-flowing stream. A particularly pointy and sharp rock that didn’t _want_ to move, perhaps. Maybe he didn’t know how to begin moving, how to make changes, while everyone else just flowed past him and vanished on the horizon.

  
Some people had made enough of an impact for their imprint to remain on him long after he had left them. The family who had given him his surname, for example. There was a reason he hadn’t made a request to legally change it once he turned eighteen. It wasn’t simply a matter of him having no idea what he could possibly change it to. It was something to hold onto, an identity, something that held him down and rooted him, gave him a sense of purpose. Something that was entirely his.

  
Somewhere along the line, Lance must have been one of those people who had lingered in the back of his mind, like a stick wedged into the silt of the metaphorical river. A gangly, immature, irritating stick.

  
They had been grouped together for a routine simulation exercise around a year after both of them had started their studies at the Garrison. The task was to emulate a rescue mission on the cold and unforgiving surface of Europa, a complex task that many of the teams beforehand had failed miserably. Keith had watched as Iverson chewed them out one by one, fists clenched by his sides as he waited to be allocated to a team. He mapped out the task in his mind, forged a perfect route that would lead the team and their targets to safety with no place for error. With him at the helm, they were not going to fail.

  
They failed.

  
The moment Keith was pushed rudely from his self-allocated position of leadership he knew everything was going to go horribly wrong. In most group exercises, the same routine took place: he would dictate the best path to complete the mission, his classmates would protest and bicker, Keith would lose his temper and attempt to complete the task on his own, and then the instructors would intervene and order everyone to cooperate until finally something go done. In the end, it worked out. He wasn’t popular, but he didn’t care. It didn’t matter if he got along with his classmates, as long as he fulfilled the exercises to best of his abilities. It was his own score going on his record, not those of his fellow cadets.

  
Lance had not caught the memo concerning this usual arrangement, or had perhaps decided to completely ignore it. Having proclaimed himself as the leader, complete with a flourishing entrance into the cockpit and an announcement that no one needed to worry now that ‘the Tailor’ had arrived, he delegated Keith to second and proceeded to ignore everyone else’s advice for the entire exercise. The result was a resounding group failure, complete with every one of their fictional targets dying before they could reach them, their oxygen reserves running out and a quite extraordinary crash. Iverson had demanded to know what happened, but no one had any answers. Keith, seething, had stood and stared at the floor with his fists clenched so hard his nails bit into his palms. There was no point causing an argument here and now, he had told himself firmly, repeatedly. He would never have to see or work with Lance again. _Just ignore him, he’ll disappear._

  
Fortunately, his hopes had come true and their paths hadn’t crossed again, or at least as far as Keith could recall. He had been able to forget about Lance’s entire existence until the day Shiro had crashed back down to Earth and back into Keith’s life, and then there had been Lance, sweeping in with his little gang of followers and his gradiose ideas of saving the Galaxy Garrison’s favourite hero. In the chaos and panic of the moment, when Lance had insisted that they knew one another and had become ‘arch-rivals’ from that day forward, Keith had completely forgotten he existed before that moment. He didn’t want to think about Lance. He had been focused on nothing but the task at hand. Shiro was alive. Shiro was back. This fact encompassed his entire thought process, swallowing up everything else, swiftly followed on its heels by the realisation that he needed to get Shiro to safety. He had reluctantly allowed Lance, Pidge and Hunk to tag along simply out of a need to escape quickly - they would only drag him down if he took the time to stand there debating. That was the first time they had worked together as one, though they had bickered and snapped at each other for the entire journey back to safety. Not as paladins, not as friends, but as a team. It was good enough - a foundation on which to build.

  
And that foundation had certainly been needed. There had been no let-up since, no time or space to breathe. They had had to learn to work together, to figure out one another’s strengths and weaknesses - even though sometimes it felt that Allura had ended up doing a lot of that for them - and to support each other in their struggles, whatever they might be. Keith had been forced to tolerate the others, telling himself he could do that as long as his primary focus was still on ensuring that Shiro was OK. Shiro was not OK, he was far from it, but there was very little they could do when they had all simultaneously fled the Garrison only to end up hurled into the middle of an intergalactic war. It was bizarre, almost laughable, how much life had changed. Keith didn’t even know how far away Earth was now, and his entire life with it, so small and so distant in the enormity of the universe. Once, he could remember sitting in lectures at the Garrison, seated at a grey desk and staring at grey walls and dreaming of a life beyond. A life among nebulous skies and glittering stars and black space that went on forever. He had dreamed of it, wished for it, and here it was - every bit as beautiful, but nothing like he had expected.

  
Life as a paladin was terrifying and chaotic and sometimes he felt as if he could barely breathe. But it was also earnest, and different, and entirely new. He had friends - no, a family. They genuinely cared for him, and though it was a given that his priority had initially only been Shiro, he had first softened and then warmed to his new companions. The only warmth he had ever felt towards anyone was a fiery urge to overtake them and succeed where they hadn’t. It was so new, and he felt so tentative, but it was… _nice_. Space had unlocked not only his potential but a side to him that he didn’t know he possessed.

  
Flying with Red was an incredible experience as well, one that put the Garrison’s finest ships to shame. This was not simply because most of his jobs after the Kerberos disaster had remained within Earth’s orbit. He didn’t want to think about the Kerberos disaster, he wanted to turn away and forget about it, even though guilt gnawed at him because Matt and Samuel were still lost. Shiro had so many holes in his memory and unanswered questions lingered everywhere they turned, made all the more frustrating by the fact that their primary focus could not be the search for his companions. The Alteans’ imminent fight with the Galra had to take precedence over everything else - Keith might once have refused to understand that, but now he could, though he didn’t have to like it. He could empathise with Pidge’s urge to strike out on her own and try to find her family, but he couldn’t do it, and neither could she. They needed to remain together, where they could support one another.

  
But that was OK. They were a team, and nothing was going to change that. For the first time in his life, Keith felt confident in those he stood alongside, instead of feeling that they were holding him back. He didn’t truly _want_ to escape. They could face up against anything that stood in their path.

  
“Keith!”

  
Sure, they still fought - over slightly uneven portions of food goo, who got to use the sofa and who had to sit on the floor, whose duty it was to clean the bathroom next - but they worked, as a family and as a team. It was an uplifting feeling, a sensation of release, to realise that those he accompanied truly wanted one another to succeed.

  
“Keith, it’s me! It’s Lance!”

  
Of course it was Lance. Who else could that irritating voice belong to?

  
He opened his eyes a crack and the world swam above him, a blur of the night sky black as pitch and broken by the vibrant colours of nebulae above. The stars blazed, first pinpricks of white, then growing and burning into his vision until he had to look away again. The faint scent of burning reached his nose, and the vague recollection of a gunshot followed behind it. A tree, its trunk blackened and leaves curling. The shot had hit a tree. The shot he had fired.

  
A face appeared in his vision, a face with narrow features and arched brows topped with scruffy brown hair. A uniform - white and blue. A paladin uniform.

  
“Keith, please listen to me!”

  
He was listening - but why? His eyebrows drew down into a frown, his thought process slowly, steadily trying to untangle itself.

  
Why should he listen to a man in a paladin uniform?

  
He was a paladin. But these were not his paladins. These were the Alteans’ paladins.

  
_“Claim your birthright.”_

  
He was Altean - but also, he was Galran. That was undeniable. He had seen it himself, in the warped reflection of his own face in the glass of his helmet. He had stared at the yellow eyes and pointed ears and hair that had faded from deepest black to pure white. He had shed his facade of nineteen long years and reached for the potential he held as the result of a union that may never have been seen before.

  
These paladins were human. They were not his paladins.

  
_“Leave no one alive.”_

  
They needed to be removed so the Galra could regain access to their greatest weapon. Voltron should never have fallen into the hands of such inexperienced and foolish creatures, beings who had never even known that entire races of people had existed for thousands of years beyond the borders of their own tiny, insignificant star system. If they had wandered so blindly up until now, how could they be trusted to pilot a weapon whose existence had meant nothing to them? They couldn’t. They weren’t part of this war - or at least, not in the place they believed they possessed. They thought they were heroes, warriors, able to swoop in and take the helm of the Voltron Lions and defeat the Galran Empire. They were nothing but children, playing with toys they didn’t understand. Earth would be the Galra’s next target, once they had finished off the last of the irritating Alteans that had slipped through their grasp the first time.

  
Keith’s fists clenched, and his claws dug into his palms. He loosened his grip slightly, and felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth.

  
Earth was next on the list, and he could begin with these fools.

  
“Keith, you’re not one of them! You’re one of us!”

  
Another voice. A different voice. A name swam into his mind: Hunk. Yes. Another of the paladins.

  
A friend.

  
An enemy?

  
Whispers stirred in the back of his mind, taking his thoughts and turning them, twisting them until he couldn’t remember their meaning any more. A sensation took hold of him, his body swamped by a rushing feeling of panic as if he was falling; it reminded him of nights in his bed at the Garrison when he had been about to fall asleep and his body had pulled him back from the brink with a fabrication sense that he was falling. No, not the Garrison, that wasn’t his home, that was a facade… It had happened, but it wasn’t real. His life as a cadet, his life growing up in foster care, his life as-

  
“Keith! Please!”

  
His eyes snapped open and he took a shuddering breath as if surfacing from the blackest lake. His gaze met wide blue eyes, a fearful expression, a face covered with bruises and dirt and blood.

  
Lance. He tried the word, rolled it around in his mind, saw if it fit. Yes.

  
_“Destroy the paladins.”_

  
“Keith.” The tone of panic in the other man’s voice had subsided to make way for relief. He sounded as if he was choking on his own words. Tears cut through the grime on his skin, carving clean paths through the debris of so many fights. “It’s me, it’s Lance. Do you remember me?”

  
_“Leave no one alive.”_

  
“Y-yes. I do.”

  
Those three words seemed to break the last tenous hold Lance had over his emotions and he began to sob, one shaking hand held to his mouth. Keith had never wanted to initiate physical contact beyond the occasional awkward hug with Shiro and Matt when their Kerberos plans began to come together - but now he wanted to reach out and touch Lance’s arm and tell him that everything would be alright even though he wasn’t sure if anything was alright any more. But he was afraid, terrified that if he moved, his hands would find a way to wrap themselves around Lance’s neck. If his mind was tearing itself into pieces under the Galra’s control, how could he possibly know what his body was capable of doing?

  
“It’s OK. It’s all going to be OK now.” Lance’s words were running into each other in their rush to escape. He reached out to touch Keith’s shoulder and then froze when he instantly recoiled.

  
“Don’t touch me.”

  
_“Leave no one alive.”_

  
“K-Keith?”

  
“Please, don’t touch me.” Keith felt tears welling up in his eyes, and they weren’t simply from the startling brightness of the starlight after such a long period of blank darkness, or the blazing glow of Red’s accent lights above.

  
“Oh. O-OK. I got you.” Lance hesitantly leant back on his heels, clearly waiting for Keith to follow suit. Keith didn’t move. He didn’t trust himself to do anything but lie in the dirt.

  
“I’m not talking about… about a stupid hug, you idiot. I can’t…” He swallowed hard, and stared up at the jewel-bright sky so he didn’t have to look at Lance’s crestfallen expression. He looked like a foolish, sad puppy that had been scolded for chewing on someone’s slippers. A part of Keith wanted to laugh at the absurdity, and a part of him wanted to cry. “I can’t trust myself. You need to leave.”

  
_“You are one of us. One of the Galra.”_

  
Lance stared blankly at him for several long seconds, then his expression hardened and he swiped a hand roughly across his face. “No. We’re not doing that. No way.”

  
There were voices in the background - outside his mind, not the ones still lingering, still turning his thoughts and his memories into a roiling mess. Keith turned his head to see a small crowd lingering nearby, tense bodies, clenched fists, pale faces with expressions of mingled fear and hope. He checked them off against his recollections of Garrison and castle life, confirming to himself that they were real, that they had existed before this moment. Princess Allura. Coran. Pidge. Yes. Yes, he knew them all. His heart skipped a beat. They were here, and they were safe.

  
And there was Red, standing proudly above, looking down at him with eyes of warm yellow. He reached out for her with his mind, and felt waves of fondness wash over him in response. She sent him wordless messages of reassurance, of safety, of strength. Despite everything, he felt the smallest smile pass over his face. They were reconnected, even if it would only be for the briefest time.

  
He couldn’t be a paladin any more.

  
“You need to l-leave me here, Lance. G-go back to Arus. I’m not one of you.”

  
“Of course you are.” That was Allura, leaves crunching beneath her shoes as she strode over. Cyan eyes and a mass of white hair filled his vision as she leant over him with hands firmly planted on her hips. He had a vague recollection of being told off by his superiors in his early years at the Garrison, back when he had been too young and too frightened to snap a response that would land him back on cleaning duties for a month. “You are a paladin of Voltron, and you’re coming back with us. That’s final, Keith.”

  
He stared at her for a moment. Those weren’t fresh tear tracks on her cheeks beneath those that fell now from her eyes. Her lower lip was trembling.

  
“I…” Keith faltered, and tried again. “I’m one of the Galra. My… my whole existence was a lie.” It was the first time he had had to speak the words out loud since the moment his world had shattered. He didn’t even know how long it had been since Zarkon ripped his entire history to pieces. Hours? Days? Everything was a mess. “Th-they can control me. I’m not human. I was never human.”

  
“That’s OK, Keith.” Allura knelt down and brushed away his tears with a fingertip; she flinched when he shoved her hand away.

  
“Don’t touch me! I’m - I’m scared.” He felt his lips drawing back from his teeth - teeth that were no longer human but something feral, something other - and tried to control his emotions. They churned beneath the surface, but he forced his expression back to something as close to neutrality as he could get it. “I - I don’t know what’s happening. They might be on their way right now. The Galra. They might be following me. Th-they sent me to kill you all. I might hurt you - you need to l-leave me here and go.”

  
“We can fight it. We can stop it.” Lance’s voice shook, but his gaze was hard. He looked like a different person - not the lanky, irritating joker who had infuriated Keith so back in the Europa simulation. Not the metaphorical stick in the river silt that Keith had shoved to the back of his mind and tried to forget about. “I promise you, Keith, we won’t leave you behind. If the Galra are after us, we can deal with it. They’re always after us. We’ve done it before. We get out of all our stupid messes, right?” He managed a smile, even as tears continued to streak through the mud on his face.

  
“You need a new Red Paladin.” His lion let out a rumbling growl at that, but he ignored her, however much it hurt. “They’re still in my head. Still in here.” He jabbed a finger at his temple, burying it in hair that had once been pure black. “They’ll follow you, they’ll know where you are. Leave me behind. You deserve better than me, I - I’m only good for working alone anyway.”

  
“If there’s one thing I really hate, it’s self-pity-” Allura began, her entire body shaking.

  
“I mean it! Please just go!” Keith’s voice broke and he scrambled backward to broaden the distance between himself and his companions. “J-just… tell everyone I’m sorry. Tell Shiro I’m sorry.” He didn’t know where Shiro was, but he must have been in the ship somewhere, perhaps with Hunk, making sure everyone was safe and well-

  
Lance and Allura looked at one another, and for an instant, Keith could have sworn the night grew a fraction colder.  
“What?” His voice was barely audible.

  
“Keith, we, uh…” For once, Lance was lost for words. Allura looked at him, looked behind her at something he couldn’t see beyond Red’s enormous bulk. She clenched the fabric of her torn and dirtied dress between shaking hands. She started to speak, stopped, took a breath and tried again. Her gaze did not meet Keith’s. It was focused far out into the night, into the blackness of the forest where shadows swam beyond the lions’ glow.

  
“K-Keith… Shiro’s dead.”

  
Keith stared at her. He stared, and saw nothing.

  
Slowly, silently, everything collapsed, his world folding in on itself with the elegance and tragedy of a supernova.

  
Deep inside, something broke, and he screamed.


	16. Break

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone! I am SO SORRY. I genuinely didn't realise it had been more than a month since the last update. Work, the holiday season, and life happened, but that's no excuse for falling behind so badly. I hope you can forgive me! This chapter took three rewrites because I just wasn't happy with it at first and I plan to rewrite some stuff in the previous chapters before I put up what should be the final one. Thank you for reading so far, and as per usual please let me know if you spot any goofs. Hope you enjoy!

Keith knew grief well. It had only visited him once, but it had left its scar. He could still remember it, for all his effort to block it out, and then when that didn’t succeed, to hope that the years would lessen its clarity. They had not.

  
One month and four days after the mission had launched Keith had watched, stared uncomprehendingly at the proud and smiling faces of his companions; listened as news of their untimely deaths was spread across the globe. He had stood silent as the Galaxy Garrison, that had so praised the work of its finest pilot and the extraordinary advancement of his companions, happily passed blame and pointed fingers until the Kerberos incident gained a morbidly legendary status among staff and cadets alike. Snowballing in the one short year between the moment the mission was announced a failure and the day he left his desert shack without realising he might never return, it had become a curse. An event cadets spoke of in hushed and reverent tones, recalling the incredible rise to glory and subsequent fall from grace of Takashi Shirogane - the pilot who had held the hopes of thousands on his shoulders and destroyed them. Poor Samuel and Matt Holt, victims of their teammate’s incompetence. Shiro had failed his instructors, failed himself, thrown away years of work and potential. He had made thousands of cadets, who up until then had looked at him with hope in their eyes and a belief in their hearts that perhaps they could one day be as indestructible as him, face up to their own mortality. If Takashi Shirogane could die in space, anyone could.

  
Keith had learnt to keep a tight lid on his emotions, to hold back the writhing anger that swelled beneath his skin when a dismissive phrase or a look of disgust had been thrown his way from his fellow cadets and pilots at the Garrison. They didn’t matter. The companionship he had found with Matt and Shiro mattered, and everything else was just background noise. But now, he was angry. The outpouring of loathing toward one of the only people who had ever treated him as one of them had snapped something in him. He was drowning in emotions he didn’t have a name for. He had stopped breathing the moment he had woken up in that hospital bed to find his closest friends a million miles away, and now he could barely see the surface any more.

  
Keith didn’t go to the memorials. He had watched from a staff lounge on an upper floor as figures in black clothes, hunched under umbrellas drenched in a thin and persistent rain, stood in front of three new and gleaming plaques in the Garrison gardens. Iverson spoke at length of the courage and sacrifice of three men who had headed for the furthest reaches of the Solar System in the name of human advancement and had never returned. Keith was glad he couldn’t hear the words from so far away. He stood still and silent behind rain-soaked glass with his fellow pilots hovering across the room, unsure whether to speak to him or to leave him to his agony.

  
He had always felt guilty for not attending. Shiro, Matt and Samuel deserved it. After everything they had done for him, the very least he owed them was an appearance, however brief. Perhaps he could even have said a few words.

  
No. His hands had curled into fists at the thought. That wasn’t him, and Shiro wouldn’t have wanted him to pretend to be someone he wasn’t either, for the sake of a preconceived notion that you only cared about the passing of a loved one if you stood in front of a crowd of onlookers and read a poem from a sheet. Keith knew he couldn’t have remained among that gathering, listening to the insincere words of those for whom Shiro was never a friend, but a tool. He wasn’t naive enough to believe that everyone in the Garrison got along, that they all had each others’ backs in times of crisis. Years of experience had taught him exactly the opposite. Yet he had always believed, somehow, that Shiro was different, that his combination of skill and openness and genuine likability, a rare combination in such a business, had appealed him to others and brought him friends, not just admirers. It didn’t take long to dismantle that belief, to shove it into a box and push it to the back of his mind just as he had done with all the other foolish notions of his childhood.

  
Yes, he had experienced grief, and guilt, and a hundred other emotions that came with it because the human mind was complicated and he couldn’t separate the thoughts that brought him strength and the ones that pulled him back. Keith’s anguish was never just anguish. It was always tinged with something else, something wild and untamed.

  
For Keith, walking away from a fight had never been an option - and this _was_ a fight, a battle for the truth buried beneath so many impenetrable walls and diversions. After sadness and guilt and grief, there came revenge.

  
Keith was not human. He never had been. And yet, here, where he sat on broken ground staring dazedly into the face of the woman had told him his closest friend was dead, he came to realise that human and alien minds really weren’t that different after all. There was no striking realisation that he could suddenly cope, that he could separate and analyse his emotions and formulate a solution for what to do next. He couldn’t do a thing, because he was just as much a mess as the day Shiro’s proudest photograph had appeared on the television with the announcement that he was dead.

  
Despair crept in like ink, pooling in the depths of his mind and suffocating every thought. He had felt it in the middle of fights, battles entered into with such hope in their hearts, only for it to bleed out of them as rapidly and irrevocably as their energy. He had felt it when the immense strength of the Galran Empire began to look like a black, impenetrable wall in front of them, something they, as five inexperienced paladins and the last two Alteans in existence, could not hope to face up against. But mostly, he had felt it whenever Shiro was in danger. And now there were no words that could make it better, no assurances that there was always a small chance Shiro was still alive. It was all too late.

  
Keith’s pointed canines glinted in the moonlight as he screamed. He could see them reflected in the metallic surface of Allura’s circlet. So too were his lambent eyes, glowing like the stars that hovered silently above. There was nothing human there any more, there was only pain and grief and a rage that rolled from him like storm clouds across a darkened sky. But he was Keith, deep down beneath it all: Keith, who had been alone his entire life, only to finally find friends who loved him and a place he belonged just to have it all snatched away from him.

  
Twice. He had lost him twice.

  
Abruptly, as if forcing himself to act before he changed his mind, Lance leant over and grabbed Keith and pulled him into his arms. Allura flinched, and Keith snarled, but Lance held on with a grip that was surprisingly strong for all that he was so slender. Keith didn’t know which of them felt the more fragile. He could shatter like porcelain at any moment.

  
“It’s OK.”

  
It took a moment for him to realise than Lance was speaking, and then to make sense of the words. Ridiculous words, but that was Lance, ridiculous and foolish and so desperately, wonderfully loyal, and however much a part of him screamed for someone to make everything OK, he didn’t want any more lies. He couldn’t take it.

  
“It’s OK. It’s not your fault.”

  
Keith didn’t know if Lance truly believed it was his fellow paladin who needed the embrace or if it stemmed from his own purely selfish urge for reassurance. Why would he insist it wasn’t Keith’s fault, unless he had reason to believe it _was?_ He was suffocating.

  
Everything had fallen to black, tunnel vision, everything but Allura’s piercing cyan eyes and the painfully clear tone of her voice in alien ears as she told him Shiro was dead.

  
There was no blood on his hands, nothing to show - but somewhere, deep down, he knew.

  
“Where are they?”

  
“W-what?” Lance drew back slightly, eyes wide.

  
_“Where are they?”_ Keith’s voice was deafening in his own ears, a pained cry wrapped in a snarl. His nails - claws - gouged furrows into the hard plating of Lance’s armour, and he shoved him away harder than he meant to. “I’ll kill them! I’ll kill every last one of them!”

  
“Keith! Keith, no.” Allura gripped his shoulders and he swung to face her, teeth bared. She stared unflinchingly into his eyes, her words slow, steady, a reassurance and an order all at the same time. “We don’t have the strength to fight them now. Like you said, they could be back any minute. I, and the castle, are not back to full strength yet. Come with us, and we can make a plan. We can’t afford to run into anything.”

  
“I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.” Keith’s words were rapid, harsh, like bullets in the night. He didn’t have time for this. “What’s the point in making a plan - in me staying, all for the sake of calling ourselves a team? W-we can’t form Voltron any more. Not without a Black Paladin.”

  
His voice cracked on the last word and he saw pity grow in Allura’s eyes. “Keith, we-”

  
“There is no ‘we’, not any more. You go. I’ll fight them. I’ll fight all of them.” Keith’s words were barely audible beneath the rumbling snarl that enveloped his voice. He pulled away from both of them, shoving Lance’s hands away, scrambling to his feet. He was shaking so hard he could barely stand. “Where is he? Where’s-”

  
He stopped as his gaze drifted past Red’s enormous frame and settled on the hunched figure beyond. Hunk crouched beside a motionless figure in a shredded uniform, laying his own tattered coat across it. Bloodied limbs and bruised skin disappearing beneath a pauper’s shroud. Keith stared, though he wanted to look anywhere else, be anywhere else. Hunk’s shoulders were shaking, and tears fell silently down his face.

  
Keith’s knees buckled, and a sound left his mouth, something between a sob and a cry that held no words. He grabbed Red’s leg for balance and hauled himself back upright, taking one trembling step and then another across torn and bloody ground. Red let out a rumbling growl and followed, enormous feet sinking into the earth, her body language uncharacteristically hesitant as if unsure whether or not she should allow her paladin to look upon his fallen friend. No. That wasn’t it. She knew. She knew that laying eyes upon Shiro, facing up to what he had done, would destroy Keith, but she understood him - sometimes better than he understood himself. He would never forgive her if she stopped him.

  
Five simple steps, and the hardest journey he had ever taken.

  
Hunk glanced up, and got to his feet as Keith approached, stepping back with his head bowed. What had he been doing while Lance and Allura broke their news to Keith? Had he stayed, this entire time? Pidge stood on the other side of the clearing, fists clenched, eyes wide, with Coran beside her. Had they remained here? Had their faith in him remained as steadfast as Lance’s, unbroken despite everything he had done?

  
What _had_ he done?

  
Keith knelt, slowly, stretching out a hand to breach the gap between them until his fingers rested on the cool surface of Shiro’s paladin armour. His breath drew in sharply, as if the contact suddenly made it all real.

  
With shaking fingers he brushed the pale shock of hair across Shiro’s forehead away from his skin. His eyes were closed, his expression deceptively peaceful, his skin… hot. Too hot.

  
Keith frowned. Hunk must have noticed it. Shiro was practically burning, as if the fiercest fever had taken hold of his body. But dead bodies didn’t get feverish.

  
Keith looked up at Hunk, the movement slow, painful, as if he was moving through swamp water. There was only pain in the other man’s eyes. He hadn’t felt it.

  
Galra. That was it. Keith turned back, ignoring the puzzlement on the Yellow Paladin’s face, and pressed his palm to Shiro’s chest. The heat almost sent him recoiling backward, a sudden flash of purple blinding behind his eyes as if he had been staring into the sun. Galra poison, flowing, burning, destroying, in every inch of Shiro’s veins.

  
Poison that could not flow in a body that had died.

  
Keith let out a wordless yell and pushed Shiro onto his back; he heard the other paladins cry out behind him, confusion in their voices, scuffling footsteps on the ground, but he ignored them. His hands scrabbled for a gap in the cracked armour, found one, pressed down and discovered the faintest heartbeat.

  
He had attended countless first aid classes at the Garrison, for every ailment imaginable, but now it came down to performing those actions he had watched so many times, his mind was a blank. He had had enough of looking inside himself and seeing only a void. Desperately, he dredged up memories, recalled the words, pieced together the motions until he was pressing down on the other man’s chest with his own breath and his own heartbeat deafening in his ears.

  
“Keith! What are you-”

  
“He’s alive!” Keith’s voice came out as a broken cry, and once the words had left his mouth, inexplicably he found he couldn’t stop. “He’s alive.”

  
A stunned silence. Keith broke it.

  
“He’s _alive.”_ It was a mantra and a prayer all at once.

  
There was the briefest pause before Allura’s decisive tone broke in. “We’ll get him to the med-”

  
“No! There’s no time.” Was it fifty compressions a minute or a hundred? He was sure it was one hundred. His thought were a mess. “He’s not breathing. We can’t get him to the pods in time. I need to get him breathing first.”

  
“OK. What can we do?”

  
The princess’s immediate agreement took him by such surprise that for a moment he faltered before he found his rhythm again.

  
“Prepare the med bay. Get the lions ready to fly. I don’t know. _I don’t know!"_

  
She understood - or perhaps she didn’t, perhaps Alteans’ resuscitation processes were different to humans’ and she had no idea what he was doing, but she _trusted_ him. They all trusted him, despite everything he had done. His eyes were wet, but he couldn’t stop to wipe the tears away. For the briefest instant, he looked up, and met Lance’s eyes across Shiro’s still form. The other paladin gave him a smile, the tiniest, feeblest smile, but it was like a fleeting glimpse of sunshine across a stormy sea. He wasn’t adrift any more. He was a paladin. He was their paladin.

  
He pushed down once again, and winced as a snap split the air. _No, no, that’s not meant to happen!_

  
“It’s fine. It’s fine, Keith.” Hunk was beside him, tilting Shiro’s chin up with trembling hands to ensure his airways were clear. His voice, for all that eyes were filled with as much terror as Keith felt, was warm, grounded, a solid foundation beneath their feet. “We can fix broken ribs. Just keep going.”

  
Keith nodded and pressed down, once, twice, three times more, and then suddenly there was a shuddering beneath his hands and the sound of a strangled gasp and Shiro was moving and breathing and _there._

  
“Med bay, _now!”_ Allura roared, and Hunk gathered the Black Paladin up in his arms with no hesitation and ran for the castle-ship’s entrance ramp. Keith fell back, dirt and rocks digging into his hands and the backs of his legs, Red’s reassuring growl filling his ears and Lance’s arm around his shoulders, and sobbed.

  
“Well done, Keith.” Allura knelt beside him, kissed his forehead and buried her face in his hair. Her cheeks were wet, her hair a mess, her dress stained and tattered. They were all a mess.

  
It took several moments for Keith to find his voice, to push back the tide of overwhelming relief that had turned his legs to mush and sent tears streaming relentlessly down his face. “Y-you need to g-go. The G-Galra-”

  
“You’re coming with us, Keith,” Lance said, holding Keith’s shoulders firmly and looking into his eyes.

  
“They’ll find me! I-I can’t come with you. I saw it. I know.”

  
Lance frowned. “You saw what?”

  
“The knife.” Keith scrubbed his eyes with shaking hands. His words were barely audible, but he had to force them out, to warn them. The memory burned in his mind like an after-image of the blazing sun, the Galra knife buried between Shiro’s ribs, the ribs he had cracked trying to save his life. He had broken him, over and over, the man who had pulled him from the brink in a life he could barely remember. He didn’t deserve this. _“My_ knife. The Galra have control of my mind and they’re not going to let go. Same with Shiro. That poison is in his body and you need to get it out. You need to take the arm off. We’ve both… we’ve both been _tainted,_ brainwashed, I don’t know, but I’m a part of them and he’s not and I can’t come with you. You need to escape, and you need to get everything Galra out of his body because they can track him. They’ll find you again. That’s why I told you to ready the lions. You need to go now.”

  
Lance stared at him uncomprehendingly, but Allura spoke. Her tone was grim, and Keith could see in her eyes that she had reached the same conclusion he had. As one, they turned to look toward the still shape of Black high above. She hadn’t moved, had done nothing as the diminutive figures below did everything they could to save her paladin. It was as if their leading lion, the head of Voltron, had turned into a statue right before their eyes.

  
“What’s wrong with her?” Lance’s voice was very quiet. Somehow, Keith knew that despite his words, deep down, he understood.

  
“Black’s torn,” he said softly. From the corner of his eye, Allura nodded slowly. She had realised - she led the Castle of Lions, of course she had known. He wanted to be angry, but a part of him knew that in some ways, she was as clueless as they all were. Ten thousand years old, and yet still barely more than a child. He would have let out a bitter laugh if could find the energy. So, too, was he. He had existed before humanity’s records began, existed before his fellow paladins’ earliest ancestors could even be traced. Shiro, Lance, Hunk, Pidge, his foster parents, Garrison students and staff and everyone he had ever met; he had outlived all of them, and he remembered nothing.

  
“She doesn’t know who her paladin is,” Keith said.

  
Lance swung around to look at him, and there was a grim sense of understanding in his eyes. “That’s what Shiro said. He said he’s not the Black Paladin - that Zarkon is. I tried to tell him it wasn’t true… I didn’t want to believe it.”

  
Keith nodded, though he wanted to protest, wanted to tell them that it was all wrong. “Zarkon had the bayard. It wasn’t lost. Alfor lied.”

  
Allura opened her mouth to argue, but Keith spoke over her. He didn’t have time for this.

  
“Zarkon had the bayard the whole time, so Shiro could never be the true Black Paladin, only a temporary replacement. Now that Zarkon’s back on the scene, Black doesn’t know what to do. She’s sentient - they all are, but only to a degree. No offense, Red,” he said quickly, and the lion let out a growl in response with a wave of emotion that could have been construed as wry humour in different circumstances. “She’s loyal to her paladin, and when Zarkon was her paladin so long ago and that connection was never truly broken, she’s torn between the two. Even if she knows that what he’s doing is wrong, and recognises that Shiro is trying to fight that. But as long as Zarkon has the bayard, I don’t think she can fully free herself from his control.”

  
“So what do we do?” Lance asked breathlessly. Allura didn’t speak.

  
“Now? I don’t know.” Keith looked between the two of them, stared beyond at the glowing shape of the castle-ship as somewhere inside, Coran and the other paladins battled to shave Shiro’s life. “I’m not the leader. I can’t make these decisions. Shiro’s the leader.”

  
“Black won’t respond to anyone else,” Allura said, glancing back up to the enormous creature above. “We need to heal Shiro, rid him of all Galra influence, get Black back on our side and then formulate a plan to face up against Zarkon again.”

  
“It all sounds so easy when you say it like that, but you’re kind of skipping over the parts where we rip Shiro’s arm off and then force him to face up to the fact that he’s nothing but a stand-in for the real leader of Voltron.” Lance’s voice was harsh, bitter, and it took Keith by surprise. He had never heard a tone like that from the Blue Paladin before. They looked at one another for a moment, and then Lance scrubbed his face with his hands and let out a wordless exhalation. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do. I can’t do this any more.”

  
“You can.” When Lance didn’t respond, Keith reached out and gently gripped his arm. He had never initiated contact before, always flinched when Lance approached him with one of his enthusiastic hugs, and the taller paladin blinked at him in surprise. It took a moment for Keith to realise that his claws had pierced the other man’s uniform and were on the verge of drawing blood. Quickly, he withdrew, curling his hands into fists at his sides. Damn, he couldn’t wait to figure out how he could transform back into his previous human facade. True form or not, this wasn’t staying. That was, if he could transform back. He pushed the thought to the back of his mind. “Sorry.”

  
“Don’t worry.” Lance was silent for a moment, then he managed the briefest smile. “It’s OK. I’ll be alright. I have to be.”

  
“And you’re coming with us,” Allura said softly, her cyan gaze vibrant in the gloom. Keith looked at her, and then away again, to where bioluminescent insects whirled in the night. A dance, a pattern he couldn’t understand. There were so many things he didn’t understand. Where did he start?

  
“I can’t. They might control me again. I don’t know…” Tears pricked at the backs of his eyes and he exhaled slowly, trying to wrangle a lid back on his emotions before he lost control again. “I’ve done so much. I’ve hurt all of you.”

  
“We’re not giving up on you, Keith,” Lance said firmly. “There’s no way we’re leaving this planet without you. Wherever the hell this is.”

  
Keith wanted desperately to say yes, and he knew Red wanted that too, sending waves of encouragement towards him with a warmth that spread throughout his veins. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t-

  
The faintest rumbling reached his ears, more a feeling than a sound. He stopped, froze, meeting Allura’s gaze. She had heard it too. Keith spun, and stared into the night, gaze darting feverishly from star to blazing star until it settled on a distant purple glow. It would not be distant for long.

  
Keith doubted Lance could see with weak human vision what he and Allura could see, but he could tell that he knew. The Blue Paladin did not need to speak, and yet the word fell from his lips anyway. It was barely more than a breath, and yet it held a crushing gravity that almost brought Keith to his knees.

  
“Galra.”


	17. Bond

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello hello everyone! So sorry it's been... I don't even know how long since the last update (I did some edits for better chapter flow so I apologise if they registered in your inboxes as updates). This was intended to be the last chapter but I split it into two because I need to switch viewpoints and I didn't want it to get confusing. Also it would have just been even longer til the next update then.
> 
> Please enjoy and thanks for your continued reading!

Memories and images swam in a nebulous mass of colour and sound. Deep greys and blues solidified to form a Garrison hallway punctuated by the vibrant orange uniforms of milling cadets. Thumping footsteps and laughter bounced from the walls and the scent of cooking food permeated the air; lunch break. No sooner had the image become clear, it melted like paint down a mirror and reformed into a pale blue sky arching above a landscape of towering office blocks, apartment buildings, traffic and light and noise. He turned, slowly, trying to take it all in, to absorb it before the dream - was it a dream? - inevitably wrenched it away. Traffic roared past in a steady stream while crowds melded and rejoined like tributaries below cluttered masses of colourful signs and countless storeys of sunlit glass.

  
Home.

He had managed to push it to the back of his mind, suppress his memories of his family and the place he had once lived, but here it was, every bit as painful as he had anticipated. Homesickness hit like a wave so powerful it almost took his breath away, and he stepped back, stumbled, and tried to grab onto a nearby lamppost for balance. His hand went straight through it. He didn’t know why he was surprised, even as he failed to regain his balance and landed in an ungainly heap on the concrete. He didn’t belong here. The prosthetic Galra hand with its underlying threads of violet cables, gleaming in a mockery of human veins, did not belong here. Shiro raised the hand before his face and looked at it as if he had never seen it before, finally allowing the realisation to sink in; an understanding that he had had for a long time but refused to stop and consider. He couldn’t go back. He could never return to who and where he had once been.

  
No sooner had the thought solidified, a black and cloying presence in his mind, than the hand began to fade before his eyes and so too did the rest of his body. This time, his world was not disappearing; he was, while the world he had left behind continued its unceasing rhythm until one day there would be no one left to remember his name.

  
Darkness swept in and remained for so long that he considered vaguely that he had perhaps died. That made sense, anyway. He remembered pain, coldness; the sensation of a blade sliding smoothly between his ribs. Of course it had killed him. That was OK. He had served his purpose as the paladins’ leader; ultimately, he had failed, but that just meant that it was time for someone else to take his place. He was not meant to lead Voltron.

  
He closed his eyes, and let the world drift away.

 

****

 

“You need to pilot the Black Lion.”

  
“What?” Allura blinked, looked between the two paladins, then seemed to process what Keith had said. _“What?_ No. I can’t do that. How could I pilot her?”

  
“Because there isn’t anyone else who could do it.” Keith gestured toward the two lions standing closely behind himself and Lance. “I’ve got Red, Lance has got Blue. We can’t exactly just swap lions whenever we feel like a change.”

  
“Yes, and Black is Shiro’s lion - the Black Paladin’s lion.” Allura paused. She looked for a moment as if she wished she hadn’t corrected herself. “I’m not a paladin. This is absurd.”

  
“Damn right it’s absurd, but…” Lance trailed off, and after a moment Keith spoke up. His tone was grim.

  
“I think we’re at the point where absurdity is all we’ve got left.”

  
Allura’s gaze flickered between the two of them again before drifting back to the violet glow high above. “Fine. We haven’t got long. But… but what makes you think if Black won’t respond to Shiro, she’d respond to me?”

  
“You’re not Galra,” Keith replied simply. Lance stared at him, perplexed.

  
“But that doesn’t make any sense! If Zarkon is… is truly the Black Paladin, then she’s loyal to the Galra.” The words still came accompanied by a distinct sense of sickness, like poison on his tongue. He shook off the sensation, and pushed on. “And… and you. Red accepted you.”

  
Keith turned golden eyes on him. “Because I’m one of them.”

  
“No! That’s not what I’m trying to say at all! You’re not one of them - one of _Zarkon’s_ \- but you are part Galra. There must be good Galra out there somewhere. I don’t think the whole ‘Galra arm’ thing has anything to do with it.”

  
“It’s more complicated than that. It’s not just the arm, it’s the fact that they got inside his mind.” Keith let out a frustrated growl and pushed his hair back from his face. “I don’t know. I don’t understand how the lions’ minds work - how the connection between the pilot and lion works. Maybe Black accepted Shiro based on what she thought he was and then discovered something different-”

  
“Maybe it’s because Shiro isn’t Galra and she originally thought he was!” Lance broke in, clapping his fist into his other hand as the thought spilt straight from his mind to his mouth.

  
Allura looked at him for a moment. “That… actually makes a lot of sense, if Zarkon is still technically Black’s pilot.”

  
“So what about Red?” Keith demanded. “She knows now that I’m part-Galra, what if-”

  
He was interrupted as the enormous lion approached from behind, lowered her head and delicately ruffled his hair. He didn’t move for the briefest instant, then his hand crept upward, slowly, stiffly, and brushed across the plating of her jaw. Claws scraped on metal with the faintest chime, but left no sign of their passing behind.

  
The meaning of the lion’s motion was clear. For all that his appearance was different, Keith was still the same person who had fought so desperately to gain Red’s trust all those months ago, the same ruthless hothead who wouldn’t hesitate to throw himself in the firing line if there was any chance of protecting those he cared about. Her trust in him had not wavered. The shattered connection between Shiro and Black was not reflected in the bond between the Red Lion and her pilot. The paladins were different, and so were their lions.

  
“She trusts you,” Lance murmured.

  
“I know,” Keith said simply. For the first time, he sounded as if he believed it.

  
“Right.” Allura looked up at Black, rolled her sleeves back as best she could, and strode toward the lion. “I guess I better get on with this.”

  
“Good luck,” Lance said immediately, then realised when the Altean looked back at him with a conflicted expression that suggesting she needed luck probably wasn’t the best idea.

  
Black did not move as Allura approached, gaze still fixed unblinkingly on the cluster of lights far above. It was closer now, and though Lance couldn’t yet see the angular shapes of Zarkon’s craft, he suspected Keith could probably make out a fair few details. Not that he needed to. They had seen it enough times to find it burned into the backdrop of their dreams. There was no denying that Shiro found himself back inside Galra walls more often than not, from the amount of times Lance had stumbled across him either working out in the ship’s gym in his bedclothes at two o’clock in the morning, or sitting pale-faced into the kitchen staring into a drink he had made and never touched. Lance had never told anyone of the nightmares he himself had suffered through in recent weeks, witnessing everything from his home planet being destroyed to his fellow paladins being ripped to shreds right before his eyes. Maybe he should talk to the others, swallow his pride. Pride meant very little in the depths of space. Even more so than recovering his own peace of mind, ensuring his friends did not feel alone was the most important thing.

  
“Shiro once told me something interesting.”

  
Startled, Lance glanced around at Keith as Allura reached the Black Lion’s side. “What?”

  
The other man’s gaze was on the sky, though it was impossible to tell where his focus lay when his eyes no longer possessed pupils. Lance had a feeling, however, that he was not looking at the violet-limned ship descending from high above, but at the space beyond, a landscape of deepest black and jewel-brightness. A place they had all wished to see one day, but never like this. _“Kintsugi._ A way of fixing broken pottery with a lacquer mixed with gold or silver.” He paused, noticed Lance’s perplexed expression, and managed the tiniest smile with a flash of one white fang. “I’m not going on a spontaneous history lesson. But it means something. It’s a way of making the repair of a broken item part of its history, instead of hiding it. I don’t know.” He looked away, into the forest. “I was just thinking. I’m thinking too much.”

  
“You were thinking that maybe Shiro’s connection with Black could be repaired in the same way,” Lance said softly. “It could make them stronger.”

  
“Yeah.” Keith opened his mouth as if to say something else, but then closed it again and shifted from one foot to the other. There was little else to say, and Lance was acutely aware of it, and even more aware that his silence was a stark contrast to his usual posturing and inane chatter. He paused for a moment, then reached over to rest a hand on Keith’s arm. The contact was more for his own benefit than the Red Paladin’s, and he couldn’t deny it. Lance had always sought physical comfort from family and friends, a casual arm around the shoulders here, a rib-squeezing hug there. It was natural to him, an automatic instinct; but it was not for Keith, and perhaps he was being selfish. He just wanted someone there. He should let go.

  
As his fingers lifted from the plating of the other paladin’s armour, Keith reached up with his other hand to wrap it tightly around Lance’s. His grip was almost painful, and the tips of his claws dug into Lance’s skin, but he didn’t pull away, not when he could visibly see Keith’s barriers falling before his eyes. Only Shiro had ever gotten that close, physically and mentally. Keith had changed, was changing; Lance felt as if he should say something, but they needed to move.

  
“Let’s get to our lions.”

  
Keith nodded, broke contact and walked away. Immediately Red crouched low on the forest floor and opened her mouth to allow him access to the cockpit; Allura had already contacted Coran and the castle-ship’s thrusters were rumbling into life. The doors of Yellow and Green’s hangars slid open and the two lions rushed out into the night to take their place beside Blue.

  
“All good, guys?”

  
It was a habitual question, one that Lance often asked whenever they readied themselves either for training or for a fight, but now the words sounded hollow. There was a pause before Pidge finally answered.

  
“Shiro’s in the pods. Coran’s about to take off and get the ship to safety. What’s going on with Black? I thought Allura was getting back on the ship.”

  
“She’s going to try and pilot Black.”

  
_“What?_ Is that even possible?”

  
“I don’t know. But it’s all we’ve got left.”

  
“Can’t we just… I don’t know… leave?” Hunk suggested, a note of desperation slipping into his voice. “Get out of here before Zarkon reaches us?”

  
“Allura’s still too weak to create another wormhole,” Pidge replied. “And we can’t outrun Zarkon without it. Maybe if we had a good head-start, but…” She trailed off.

  
“Yep. Like I said… this is pretty much all we’ve got left.” Lance tightened his grip on the controls and Blue let out a reassuring growl as they watched Allura’s dimituive figure far below. Black was enormous, dwarfing her fellow lions and making the paladins look like toys in comparison. It made sense. She was the head and body of Voltron, the leader whose actions the others would ultimately follow in battle. When her actions could no longer be predicted, her loyalties a mystery, who could tell what would happen? She could kill Allura, regardless of whether or not her father had once been a paladin. She could cause so much damage in an instant.

  
Lance wanted to remain on the ground, to be within reach if anything happened, but however much the urge to stay in place thrummed beneath his skin, he would be able to leap to aid much more quickly with his lion. He tried to convince himself, desperately, repeatedly, that he was wrong. Black wouldn’t attack them - she wouldn’t do that. He whispered the words to himself as if it might make a difference, and crossed his fingers on the controls.

  
Red was attempting to cajole Black into allowing Allura in, approaching cautiously at first and then nudging her hesitantly with her paw. The motions could have been almost humorous if their situation were not so dire. At first, Black paid the other lion no heed; then, finally, she began to snarl. Red backed away a little, then stepped forward again, persistent, unrelenting. Lance didn’t know how much of her actions were from herself or Keith. His fingers clenched.

  
“Your paladin is not Zarkon!”

  
Allura’s voice rang out across a clearing that bled into a pressing quiet beyond the lion’s thrumming growls. The castle let out a roar that shook the earth and lifted off into the night in a blaze of light, tree branches and rocks cascading across the forest floor in its wake. It was clearly a reluctant decision; Coran would have delayed as much as possible, unwilling to leave the princess, but he couldn’t risk remaining here when Zarkon approached. Best to get out of the atmosphere and provide cover from the air, splitting the Galra’s attention. Gathered all together in one place, the castle and lions were like a bunch of sitting ducks. Lance tried to turn his attention away from the ship arcing into the sky and back to events at hand. However much he wondered what was happening within those walls, whether the other paladins’ actions had been enough to save Shiro, he couldn’t afford to split his attention this way. But how could he concentrate on anything but the cold realisation that if Shiro never woke up, not only would they have lost a friend, but Voltron as well? Even entertaining the possibility sent a shard of fear into his heart.

  
“Shiro is your paladin, but he’s… he’s not here.” Allura’s voice trailed off from a commanding roar into a much weaker tone to match her deceptively delicate appearance. She paused, then squared her shoulders and tried again. Lance could almost sense that she wished she were in her battle armour rather than her usual dress that, for all its elegance, was wildly impractical in such a situation. “Allow me to pilot you! I’m the daughter of Alfor - you know me! You trust me! Please let me in. We have to fight Zarkon.”

  
The unspoken question hung in the air. If, by some miracle, Black allowed her access, could they form Voltron? Did she need to match some set of credentials to complete the transformation, just as Shiro had done? Lance doubted that the fact that she was Alfor’s daughter would allow her a free pass to skip all the training he and the other paladins had endured to gain their lions’ trust, but in this situation, it would be nice to think it could happen as an emergency plan.

  
“Please.” The word fell into the night like a stone, but there was no response.

  
Allura inhaled a sharp breath, pulled the hem of her dress away from her feet and strode toward the lion.

  
A blinding blue light split the scene and sent Lance rocking back in his seat; he peered through his fingers with watering eyes as the glow cooled and solidified into a dome of interlocking cyan lines protecting the lion from every angle. Within the briefest moment, Black was impenetrable.

  
“Allura, are you alright?”

  
The voice was Pidge’s, laced with concern, and when Lance impatiently rubbed tears from his stinging eyes he looked down to see that the Altean was sprawled on the forest floor several metres from Black’s shielding. She scrambled to her feet and wobbled for a moment; in response to Lance’s concern, Blue stepped forward slightly. He appreciated the gesture, though what the enormous creature planned to do to steady the princess was anyone’s guess.

  
“I can’t do it.” There was a tremor in Allura’s voice that quickly extended to her body. She turned to look up at the other lions and their paladins, and a single tear tracked down her cheek. “I don’t know what to do.”

  
There was a beat of silence, and then Pidge spoke up.

  
“Of course you know what to do, princess.”

  
“Yeah, you’ve got us out of every tough situation before,” Hunk chimed in.

  
“As much as I’d like to join in with the verbal group hug, we need a plan, and fast.” Keith, grim and stern in contrast to his fellow paladins’ reassuring tones. “Zarkon’s ship is going to enter this planet’s atmosphere in minutes. We need to leave Black and fight him with just the four lions and the ship.”

  
“It’s not just a matter of that, though,” Allura protested.

  
“Yeah, she’s right,” Lance added. “Black is a sitting duck for Zarkon to take control of if we just fly off and leave her here. We lose Black, we’ve lost everything.”

  
There was a second’s pause, before Keith snarled, “Well, go on, then, tell us your master plan, because I sure as hell haven’t got one.”

  
Frustration and terror had merged into a snappiness that Lance recognised all too well from a dozen battles before. He didn’t rise to the other man’s tone, instead steadying his fingers on Blue’s controls and exhaling slowly. No one was going to like this idea.

  
“I think Keith needs to try.”

  
Silence for one long second.

  
“Try? Try what?” Pidge asked incredulously. “Piloting Black?”

  
“Yes.” Before anyone could respond, Lance pressed on, “I know it sounds mad, but like Keith said, I think madness is all we’ve got left. Think about it. We believe Black accepted Shiro initially because she thought he was Galra, same as Zarkon, but then she accepted him because she grew to trust him. Now that Zarkon’s trying to get her back, she’s conflicted. She doesn’t know who her paladin is so she’s locking us all out in defense. But if a part of her knows Shiro is her paladin, then instinctively, she must also trust his judgement. She trusts who he trusts.”

  
“Except she doesn’t trust me enough to let me in,” Allura protested.

  
Lance paused, not sure how to phrase his next statement. Time was running out. “I know, and I’m sure Shiro trusts you - why wouldn’t he, we all do - but think who Shiro trusts the most. Who has he known the longest out of all of us?” Nobody responded for a moment, whether in surprise or consideration he had no idea. “Keith. Keith is the one Shiro trusts the most. He told me once, at stupid o’clock in the morning when neither of us could sleep. He said that if he ever failed in leading Voltron he would want Keith to take over instead.”

  
There was silence from Keith for several moments. When he spoke, his voice cracked.

  
“He said that?”

  
“Yes.”

  
“But what about Red?”

  
“I’m sure Red will understand.”

  
“No, I mean, you said Black will be a sitting duck if we fight Zarkon with just the four lions,” Keith insisted. “If I go to Black, then that leaves Red in that position instead.”

  
“But Red isn’t Zarkon’s target right now,” Pidge pointed out. “No offense. But Zarkon wants what he thinks is his lion back. His focus is Black.”

  
Keith fell silent for several painful moments. Lance could hear the other man’s shaking breaths through his helment, and a moment before he could remind his fellow paladin that they needed to act in a hurry, he spoke again.

  
“Fine. I’ll try. But… but if it works… what if Zarkon takes over my mind again? While I’m in Black? We’re all screwed. We’re all _dead.”_

  
Lance chewed his lip. He wasn’t used to being the ones everyone else turned to for reassurance - especially the Red Paladin. He wasn’t sure he was any good at this. That was Shiro’s job. The one who made the plans, made the decisions, gave reassurance and advice wherever it was needed. For all that Keith was Shiro’s choice of right-hand man, the job of maintaining team spirit seemed to have fallen to Lance - but he wasn’t sure he could do it.

  
No. Blue represented friendship, trust, loyalty. She was the glue that held the team together.

 

_"If Black is the mind, Blue is the heart.”_

  
Lance remembered those words, ones that Allura had once told him when he was sitting alone in the castle’s living quarters after a particularly fraught battle - a clash that had resulted in a barbed exchange between Keith and Lance with the Red Paladin telling Lance he had been nothing but a distraction the entire time. He had apologised later, and insisted he didn’t mean it. Lance knew he didn’t - but the words still stuck, deep inside.

  
Allura was right. Blue’s strength was not offense like Red, or defense and brute strength like Yellow, or agility and intellect like Green. It was a strength that lay in the heart, an unbending belief in her companions. A faith that was reflected in her paladin.

  
“I know you can do this, Keith.”

  
The violet glow high above was closer than before, approaching them at frightening speed. Lance imagined he could already hear the roar of Zarkon’s immense ship. They had moments to make a decision, to prepare for one of the biggest battles of their lives.

  
Finally, Keith spoke. His voice trembled, but a steely resolve ran beneath its surface; strong as iron, bold as fire.

  
“Fine. Let’s do it. Let’s see if I can become the Black Paladin.”


	18. Chimera

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO EVERYONE. Wow. I am so so sorry. Life has been crazy lately - work, art stuff, all sorts of things that I won't bore you with. More to the point, I really didn't want to just spit out two half-arsed chapters at you to finish this story off after your investment in it. I've been doing bits and pieces here and there but it's not until today that I've had the chance to sit down and bash out 10k words. And it's DONE. I split the final chapter into a chapter and an epilogue because 1. it was crazy-long, and 2. I think it worked better that way.
> 
> Thank you so much for the incredible feedback on this project of mine. It turned out way bigger than I expected - this was only supposed to be around 10k total but it turned into an entire exploration of Keith's character. Of course there are some things that are now inaccurate because I started this before S2 and there are some things I've taken creative license with because I just didn't really know how they're supposed to work in canon. Like I said this is my first fanfic in years, I normally write original work, so I was worried it wouldn't be good enough. But I've learnt a ton working on it, and your support has been amazing. Most of all, it's been FUN!
> 
> Please enjoy the final chapters, and I'd really appreciate you letting me know what you think :)

  
_Fire in my lungs_  
_The blood is soon to run_  
_The things I could do_  
_If you only knew_

_\- Chimera, HANA_

 

* * *

 

 

Slowly, the jaws of the Red Lion drew back and a circle of cool light spilled onto the debris-strewn ground. Keith stepped out of the pilot’s seat and descended beneath the beast’s metallic teeth to set foot on the forest floor, the artificial glow sliding across his pale hair and picking out highlights on his jacket. He paused, glanced down at himself. The red jacket that had become so much a part of his identity, the white cuffs stark against the deep violet of Galra skin. He exhaled slowly, and lifted his gaze to the Black Lion far above. Past, present, and future meeting as one. Could he be the Black Paladin?

  
Of course not. Shiro would survive. He would be fine. But would he want to continue to lead Voltron?

  
Shiro has always been a leader.

  
Except he hadn’t, not really. He was merely the pilot on the Kerberos mission - indispensible, yes, but not the one in charge. He had never once stated that he wanted to take the position as the head of Voltron, the one to pull the others together when they were too intent on bickering to foucs on the task at hand, and yet everyone had simply expected it anyway. Lance idolised Shiro from a time before they’d even met, Keith already trusted him implicitly, and this combined knowledge had caused the others to simply assume he was the best suited to the role. But just because he was good at something did not mean he wanted to do it.

  
Was that why Black had rejected him in the heat of battle? Because his heart wasn’t in it?

  
No, that wasn’t it. He loved the paladins, and their responsibility to protect those at risk from Zarkon’s totalitarian regime was not something he would ever take lightly. Pride flowed through the link the five of them shared every time they formed Voltron and fought as one, and though it was an emotion shared by all of them, Keith could tell that most of it came from Shiro. He could see the connection between the paladins in his mind’s eye, at first a buzzing distraction that irritated him when he was so used to working alone, but now a constant and steady reassurance. The core strength at the centre of their bond pulsed a solid and vibrant purple, its warmth instinctively pulling them together. Shiro would never leave his position as the leader of Voltron by choice - but perhaps, by necessity, he would consider it. Was that why he had told Lance that Keith should take his place instead?

  
He was confident in the paladins’ abilities, but that did not mean that faith was reflected in himself. Was it self-doubt that had shattered his bond with Black?

  
It was the only explanation that made sense. Shiro trusted his paladins, but he did not trust himself. And why would the Black Lion believe in a paladin who didn’t think he was capable of the task before him?

  
Perhaps Shiro believed he may lose focus in the middle of battle, for all his repeated mantras to the team - ‘Patience yields focus’, and various other words of wisdom that Keith had once yawned at in humour but now made sure he took to heart. Maybe he had always been scared he might come to harm his friends, long before the attack that left him with his hands wrapped around Lance’s neck. Keith might once have been unable to understand a fear that you could not control your own actions; even when he had been expelled from the Garrison for punching a superior officer, he had known and seen exactly what he was about to do. He simply decided to disregard the consequences. But now, he understood. Now that the Galras’ sinuous influence had found its way into his mind and turned memories into twisted nightmares, he could empathise with Shiro for the first time since they had been reunited after Kerberos. He had always sympathised, but he had never truly understood. They were closer, and yet, with Shiro lying motionless in the castle-ship bleeding from a wound by Keith’s blade, they felt further away than ever.

  
He would repair that void, whatever it took. And right now, though it was crazy and terrifying and utterly insane, the first task in front of him was to pilot the Black Lion.

  
It would be just like piloting Red, he told himself. Just the same. Except Black was a lot bigger.

  
One hell of a lot bigger.

  
His fists clenched slowly as he looked up, and up further still, to take in the sight of the enormous lion above, stoic and silent beneath a cloak of cyan light. What if she refused to allow him in? What if she became enraged, and turned on him and the other paladins-  
What if, what if, what if. He had never concerned himself with ‘what ifs’ before. His thought process had always been, as Shiro put it, ‘I need to do a thing, so I’m going to do the thing’ - usually ignoring his friend’s feeble protests to please not do the thing. What was different now?

  
He was. And so was his understanding of this situation.

  
The stakes were higher now. He didn’t have the safety net of the other paladins, or the Garrison, or Shiro’s constant support to back him up and catch him when he went too far and fell from his path. Things had switched around. He was the key, the only one left who could turn this situation on its head.

  
And to do that, he had to become the head of Voltron.

  
At least, temporarily.

  
_Shiro will be fine. He wants me to do this._ Keith repeated the words out loud in a feeble effort to convince himself and then looked up at the beast standing high above.

  
“Black Lion! Let me pilot you.”

  
It sounded ridiculous, his voice weak in the darkness. But what was he supposed to say? He was already painfully aware that hollering “I am your paladin!” at the Red Lion had not exactly worked as he’d hoped - and Black wasn’t even his. Red had only responded when Keith was in direct danger - and clearly Black was not about to do the same right now for her paladin, so what were the chances of it happening for someone she barely knew?

  
Keith glanced once toward the violet light in the sky, growing larger by the second, then turned back to the lion. No time to think. He could only act, impulsively, instinctively, and without any real reason other than some half-baked idea that he was doing the right thing.

  
The same as usual, then.

  
He focused on the warm familiarity of the other paladins’ presences in the back of his mind, once a sensation he had only noticed when they formed Voltron but now, increasingly, something that seemed to remain constant no matter how far apart they were. There was the cool blue of Lance, a spark of humour and a resilient faith that his friends could complete any task placed in front of them. Hunk’s bright yellow, like a sunny day or a comforting hug, surrounding a core of rock-steady strength. And finally, Pidge’s vibrant green, a quick wit and a determination that far belied her diminuitive size. Pidge could do anything she put her mind to, and so could he. Shiro’s solid presence was missing, the underlying thread that held them all together, but he would make up for it. He would hold them and take their faith and warmth and trust with him into the cockpit of the Black Lion. There was no time to think about whether he could do it.

  
He _would_ do it.

  
“Black, you need to choose your side!”

  
His voice was stronger now, cutting through the dimness like a knife as Red growled behind him. The sound melded with the rough undertone that had developed in his own voice when he awoke to find himself wearing the facade of a Galra. They were one and the same, and she trusted him enough to let him walk away from her and pilot another lion for the sake of the greater good. He couldn’t let her down.

  
“Zarkon will use you - he doesn’t care about you! I know you have your doubts in Shiro. He has doubts in himself.” There was no point in lying to the creature above him - he would not insult her in that way. There was no doubt in his mind that the lions were sentient - it was the only thing that made sense. The Galra did not see them in that way. In their eyes, the Voltron lions were tools to be used. The bond meant nothing. “But he’s a good man. He’s trying to fight the Galra, even after everything he’s been through. I know he’s not strong enough yet, he knows that, and he wants me to take over if he ever finds that he can’t. And right now - right now, he’s not here, because of something I did. I hurt him, and I want to make it right.” His voice cracked, but he pressed on. “Please let me pilot you, just this once, to stop the Galra. Then Shiro can prove to you that he’s worthy of being the Black Paladin. I truly believe that.”

  
He waited, fists clenched, teeth gritted. Silence settled all around. For a moment, it seemed as if the entire planet was holding its breath.

  
Black did not move.

  
Keith exhaled, emotions rising so quickly to the surface that for a moment of sheer panic he didn’t know what to do. He was suffocating.  
He had failed.

  
Then Black roared, the glowing shield fell away, and the lion knelt down before him.

  
Keith’s knees almost gave way, but the distant whooping sound from Lance and cheers of relief from Hunk and Pidge sent him sprinting into the open cockpit. Shiro hadn’t had his helmet, and Keith had left his own with Red, figuring it wouldn’t function in another lion. He had no idea how any of this was going to work, but that was pretty much how his plans had been going since the night Shiro had been brought back to Earth, and he didn’t see any sign of things changing now.

  
He hurried into the pilot’s seat and rested a hand on the controls as Black closed her jaws and got to her feet. Stars above, she was enormous. He knew that, of course, but somehow, piloting the lion put things into an even clearer perspective than flying beside her. His view expanded far beyond the sight he had beheld from within Red’s cockpit, toward where the green-cloaked horizon gave way to the palest glow of the planet’s setting sun. For a brief instant, panic threatened to overwhelm him again at the realisation that he sat at the helm of their greatest weapon against Zarkon - apart from Voltron itself. He gripped the controls, felt the lion’s snarl rumble through his seat, and looked down through her eyes to the vibrant colour of the four beasts lined up below. All stood looking up at him, yellow eyes alight, waiting.

  
Waiting for him to tell them what to do.

  
“Red, activate shield,” Keith called, unsure if his command would even work from here, but a blue light enveloped his lion and within seconds she was protected. He hoped - prayed - she would be alright. Like Lance had said, she wasn’t Zarkon’s target. She had to be fine.

  
Because he didn’t know what he’d do without her, any more than he knew what he’d do if Shiro did not survive.

  
Black roared, and Keith turned his gaze toward the shape of the Galra ship far above. It had stopped, its jagged shape slicing the sky like a wound, flanked on all sides by smaller fighter craft. Just like the paladins, Zarkon was waiting. He knew Keith had no other way out.

  
Well, if he was waiting for a response, he would get one.

  
Keith roared, the lion roared, and he shoved the controls forward so they shot into the sky. Blue followed, then Yellow and Green, slipping easily into formation as they raced toward the cluster of ships framed in burning violet. The castle-ship swept by in a blaze of silver and Keith forced his attention back into their ascent before it could wander toward an inevitable worry for Shiro, Coran and Allura. With the ship so low on power, perhaps Zarkon would turn his sights towards it as well as the lions, to attempt to sweep the entire board and take everything for himself. It was just as much of a sitting duck as Red - but Keith stood between them, and he would not let the Galra break through.

  
Did Zarkon know Keith had broken free of his control? Was he aware of Shiro’s brainwashed attempt to kill Lance? There was no way to know. Maybe he believed Shiro was still piloting Black.

  
Perhaps he thought Keith still remained under his control, and that he was bringing the lions right to his doorstep as commanded.

  
The corner of Keith’s mouth curled up and he felt the tip of a pointed fang touch his lip. Let Zarkon celebrate his own success. He was about to get a nasty surprise.

  
But could he put the others at risk? His grip loosened slightly on the controls as the Galra ship loomed ever larger in his view. Black growled, sensing disquiet in her pilot, and he hurriedly tightened his grip again.

  
He needed to make sure they were willing to take part in his plan. A plan that was possibly foolish and reckless just like all his others. Was this the turmoil Shiro went through every time he needed to make a decision for the benefit of the team? Probably not, since his ideas were not ridiculous. How did he do it?

  
No time to think. He might be piloting the Black Lion, but he was not Shiro, and the other paladins weren’t expecting him to be.

  
“Guys, I think Zarkon still thinks I’m under his control. I’m going to infiltrate them and destroy them from the inside - or at least, that’s the plan.”

  
Silence, for a painful second. Then Lance spoke.

  
“Go for it. We’ll be right beside you.”

  
“Are you sure?” Keith’s voice shook.

  
“We’re sure,” Pidge replied, followed closely by Hunk’s murmur of agreement. In the holographic windows hovering above the cockpit controls, he could see the faces of his fellow paladins. There was fear there, yes, but also an unrelenting determination. Hunk was visibly shaking, but no more than he did when Shiro was in charge. Lance’s cocky smirk was in place just as it always was when he was trying to hide a deep and gripping fear, and Pidge’s jaw was tight with a combination of terror and the rage she held within her for those who had taken her family. Keith was their leader, and they trusted him. He looked at his reflection in the screen before him, saw golden eyes and purple skin and hair of brightest white, and nodded.

  
“Let’s do this.”

  
Zarkon’s ship loomed large in front of them now, blocking out the stars in sweeping shapes of deepest obsidian. Violet light swept along its every angle, piercing into Keith’s newly sensitive vision, almost blinding him. He growled, and angled Black toward the ship’s bridge.

  
“Red Paladin.”

  
The voice was like a sledgehammer to the skull, and he flinched beneath its force. The link between him and Zarkon reignited and every hair on his body stood on end as an insatiable urge began to claw at his mind, an urge to acquiesce to the Galra Emperor’s every command just as his heritage commanded.

  
“Red Paladin, do you bring me the Voltron lions?”

  
He gritted his teeth and raised his head from the instinctive position he had curled into at the sensation of another presence invading his mind. “I do.”

  
“Well done.”

  
Either Zarkon knew he was lying and had formulated a trap, or he believed his powers to be impenetrable. No way - no time - to find out now. He pushed the controls forward, and the other paladins followed him into the belly of the ship.

  
A shudder ran through Black as the violet glow of the craft’s interior swept across them, and a moment later Keith flinched as well. A throbbing headache had begun at the base of his skull as they approached the ship, and now it threatened to consume him, bringing with it unrelenting waves of pain that crashed through his entire body one after the other. He didn’t know how long he could withstand the assault - how long it would take for his mind to break, for his will to be swept away into the darkness.

  
He couldn’t let that happen. If Zarkon regained control over his mind, the other paladins didn’t stand a chance. He was piloting Black, the most powerful of the lions. This had been a mistake. This was all one huge, terrible mistake-

  
“It’s OK, Keith, we’re here.”

  
Pidge. He gripped onto the sound of her voice, held on tight to its familiarity. He had no idea how much she understood of what was going on inside his mind, but when he glanced back up at the screens before him, he met the concerned gazes of three paladins. Beyond them, his reflection was tense, shoulders stiff, expression twisted with pain. Of course they could see something was wrong. If he believed the plan would fail, what hope did the rest of them have?

  
True courage wasn’t the ability to continue without fear, Shiro had once advised Keith when the younger man was insisting that was exactly what it meant. It was the ability to continue when fear dogged your every step. It was the strength to put a greater good above your own wellbeing, and to protect those you loved with the knowledge that you may not survive the effort.

  
“Thanks, Pidge. It’s OK. It’s going to be OK.”

  
His voice was stronger than he had expected, and he knew why. Acceptance.

  
He may not get out of this, but they would. He would not consider any other option.

  
Keith guided Black toward the ship’s cavernous hangar, and the other lions followed, metallic feet landing with thuds that shook the structure. Galra passing through the ship’s corridors halted to stare in disbelief at the enormous beasts before them; some simply looked baffled, while others whooped and cheered at their apparent success.

  
Keith smiled grimly. Let them convince themselves they had won. There was no victor yet.

  
“Where is the Red Lion?”

  
At the end of the hangar, where an enormous archway framed a doorway leading to the corridor beyond, a figure stepped forward flanked on either side by guards in deep grey armour. The ever-present glow that permeated the passageways of every Galra ship and pierced into the Keith’s vision was reflected from interlocking armour, a heavy cloak, the cruel line of a scar slicing across one vibrant yellow eye. Zarkon.

  
In the viewscreens, Keith saw the other paladins tense. Hunk visibly flinched, and Lance’s face, still streaked with dirt and blood from their earlier struggle, was frozen into a mask of terror. They had strolled right into Zarkon’s grasp, exactly where he wanted them, trapped from every angle.

  
What he had done?

  
Miraculously, Keith found his voice from somewhere. “I can’t pilot two lions.”

  
He hoped his tone was convincing enough. What had he sounded like while he was under Zarkon’s control? It wasn’t something he wanted to think about.

  
“I am assuming, in that case, that the fraudulent Black Paladin is dead.”

  
Keith took a trembling breath, praying that somehow the Galra could not see into the cockpit of any of the lions and read the paladins’ expressions. “Of course.”

  
Hunk visibly flinched at the words, for all that he knew they were not true - or at least, that Shiro had still been clinging to life the last time they’d seen him. Surely, they would know if something had happened. There would be a tremor in their connection, a break. A void.

  
Keith pushed the thought away.

  
“I see.” There was no way to tell whether Zarkon could see through his lies or not. “You have done well. Now leave these lions. I want you to return and collect the Red Lion.”

  
Keith’s fingers tightened so hard on the controls that one of his claws gouged a mark in the rubber grip. In the screens below, he could see the other paladins’ eyes widening as realisation struck them at the same time. He hadn’t thought that far ahead, to the point where he would be expected to bring Red and leave his companions behind in the belly of a Galra ship. He hadn’t thought about anything. He was so stupid-

  
No, he couldn’t afford to waste precious seconds berating himself. If something went wrong in a battle, Shiro didn’t pause to beat himself up over it. He changed the plan, reformulated their assault, and took them to victory.

  
Well, reformulating this plan was going to involve unleashing all inhibitions and wrecking everything in sight.

  
He could do that.

  
But how to communicate to the other paladins? Zarkon could hear him from outside the lion, most likely because he didn’t have Shiro’s helmet. Beyond an impromptu game of charades via their cockpit cameras, he didn’t think there was any effective way to let Lance, Hunk and Pidge know that he was planning to blow up everything in sight.

  
_I guess I’ll just have to do it._

  
“Well?” Zarkon demanded, a hint of impatience entering his voice. Keith knew that tone. It was dangerous.

  
“Sure, I’ll get the Red Lion,” he replied through gritted teeth. “Once I’ve finished with you!”

  
Before Zarkon could respond he wrenched the controls forward and the Black Lion launched herself toward the Galra emperor. Screams of alarm echoed from the walls, screams of the other paladins sounded from the screens on the control panel but he ignored it all until the sound of gunfire. Black snarled as strikes ricoched from her side, her wings, her head. Keith’s hand was torn from the controls and he gripped hard to his seat as the lion was thrown to the side. Distantly, he was aware of Blue, Yellow and Green racing forward to catch him up, but all his focus was on Zarkon and Haggar before him.

  
“Keith, what the hell are you doing?” Lance yelled, his voice strangled.

  
“What I said I was going to do!”

  
“I didn’t realise we were doing that _yet!”_

  
“This is Keith we’re talking about,” Pidge said dryly. “Expect the unexpected.”

  
“Just - just do it!” Keith growled. He could see the plan unravelling before his eyes, the Galra seeming to multiply on either side of him, from balconies above, weapons aimed at the unprotected and disorganised lions as yellow eyes penetrated the smoky gloom-

  
_Don’t think. Just act._

  
“Please,” he added, belatedly, breathlessly.

  
A pause.

  
“You got it,” Lance said, and Blue rushed forward.

  
Of course the Galra would be prepared for an attempted assault from the paladins. Zarkon wouldn’t have ruled for ten thousand years if he could be so easily fooled by a newbie paladin with barely any idea how to pilot his own lion, let alone the head of Voltron. But Keith had been so sure he could convince them, at least for a little while, that he was still beneath their control. Their grip on him had been so unyielding, the fact that he had broken it at all was practically a miracle.

  
What had broken it?

  
The paladins. Companionship. Faith. An undying trust. Everything they represented, rolled into one.

  
It was the only thing that made sense, the only thing amid a world of swirling chaos and gunfire. The paladins rooted him when he had nothing to hold him down, no family, no home, nothing to call his own. Lance’s unwavering faith, Pidge’s determination, Hunk’s reassuring presence. Shiro, a constant source of strength despite the incredible odds stacked against them at every turn.

  
He didn’t know where he fit in yet, what role he played, but he was proud to be a part of it.

  
He was home, and that knowledge had brought him back from the brink.

  
Once, he might have mocked the idea that he could have come to rely to wholly on a select group of other people, when he had been alone for so long. But he hadn’t held this strength when he was on his own.

  
Keith let out a wordless yell and sent Black flying across the cavernous hangar toward the diminuitive figures at its end. Deceptively small in the lion’s enormous field of vision, Zarkon stood unflinching with Haggar at his side. Flickers of purple energy gathered around the woman’s hands, swirling down her arms like living lightning and centering at a point in front of her. He had to act fast. Haggar would create a weakness, a chink in his armour, and then Zarkon would take his distraction as an opportunity to destroy him.

  
Him first, and then the other paladins.

  
Keith’s gaze flew across the controls even as his mind ran desperately through the attacks he had seen Shiro carry out in Black. A fog of panic had settled into place and no amount of ‘patience yields focus’ was going to shift it from his mind. He just had to channel it, divert it into something he could use.

  
_Sword… no, no, that’s Red, what does Black use? What the hell does Black use?_

  
Sensing his disquiet, the lion let out a shuddering roar, and his presumption that she was simply angry at his indecision was shattered when he realised that a lever on the control panel was suddenly glowing much brighter than the rest. The gap where the bayard should sit was empty, as always, and yets its absense had never hit him so hard as when he was the one sitting in a pilot seat that should not be his.

  
_Shiro should be here. Shiro should be_ here!

  
He took the anger, fuelled it, funnelled it, and grasped the lever with a snarl. Black’s head was engulfed in a blinding light that felt like spears in his eyes and he recoiled - something was wrong, he had messed up - but then he realised the glow was forming, taking shape, solidifying into a blade dozens of metres across that Black held clamped in enormous jaws. Just a short while before, the thought that he could ever fly into battle at the helm of the Black Lion, let alone activate her incredible assault power, would have been laughable. But here he was. He had done it.

  
He wrenched the controls and they dived toward Zarkon, the blade scraping the walls of the hangar and sending sparks flying in every direction as they descended. Somewhere behind him Keith was aware of Yellow throwing herself bodily onto a cluster of Galra fighters as Blue darted nimbly away from a series of energy strikes. A shuddering crash sent Keith rocking back in his seat and he glanced back, wide-eyed, to see an entire metallic section of the Galra ship peeling away from the main body as if a giant hand had lifted it with a can opener, sending Galra figures, droids and fighter craft alike spiralling helplessly into the dark beyond.

  
“That… may have been overkill on my part,” Pidge said a little sheepishly.

  
_“_ Nah,” Keith said through gritted teeth as he angled Black toward the figures below. “I think it was just enough.”

  
As the ship began to break apart around them, opening to the void of space, crowds of Galra fled to the airlocked sections that still remained intact. Haggar broke away and did the same as Keith approached. No bother. He could deal with her later. His main target was directly in front of him.

  
He pushed everything else to the back of his mind, blanked out the noise and chaos behind him, even tried to block the cries of his fellow paladins as they struck and were struck in turn. He thought of Shiro, and everything the Galra had done to him - how he had suffered in their grasp. He thought of Samuel and Matt Holt, missing, possibly dead. He thought of Lance’s dirt-streaked face and the uncloaked fear upon it when he saw the black ship approaching from high above. Hunk, kind and gentle Hunk who had fought so hard against the terror he faced at every turn and would throw himself into mortal danger if there was even a chance to save his friends. Pidge, who stayed up almost all night working on new experiments because it stopped her waking up in tears from dreams of her family. Allura and Coran, their entire world destroyed, everyone they had ever known gone at the hands of Zarkon.

  
He thought of himself, of long nights staring up at the cold starlight above, once trying to imagine what it might feel like to have a family - and then trying to remember what Shiro’s tuneless singing was like, how Matt’s laughter sounded, what it felt like to not be utterly, completely alone.

  
He roared, and Black roared with him.

  
The blade sliced through Zarkon’s form, except he wasn’t there, he was gone - where was he? - and then Black spun with speed that belied her bulky form and Keith saw him on a ledge high above. He pushed her forward again and the hangar lit up like a miniature sun as that blade ascended, swung, came down in a strike that should have shattered the entire structure with the rage he forced behind it.

  
Except it didn’t.

  
Black was frozen, hovering, unnaturally still in the air as if time had simply stopped. Keith, too, remained perfectly still for a split second before realising he could move, that it was merely the world around him that had halted like a freeze-frame on a video.

  
No - the battle continued, through a floating maze of metal that had once been the Galra ship, the lions and Galra fighters exchanging blows with flashes of light against the blackness beyond.

  
It was just Black.

  
He let out a cry of alarm, pulled on the controls, but she didn’t respond. He tried to reconnect with her mind, sent her reassuring words with barely any idea what he could possibly achieve, but there was nothing there.

  
“You’ve been foolish, Red Paladin.”

  
Yes. He had. He couldn’t deny that. Keith had dragged the other paladins with him into a scenario they stood no hope of escaping, because he didn’t know how to think before he acted. Because he could never be like Shiro.

  
“The Black Lion is mine, and soon the other lions will be taken by the Galra too. Leave, and bring back the Red Lion to me. I will find a replacement for you.”

  
“No.” Keith’s reply was barely more than a breath. He gathered himself, forced his anger and helplessness and fury into the word. _“No!_ You won’t have her!”

  
He didn’t know if he was talking about Red or Black or any of the lions. Zarkon would not have any of them.

  
Zarkon didn’t speak for a moment, and Keith struggled once again to bring Black back to life, to reactivate the controls which sat dead and silent. Even the screens that had previously shown the faces of his companions had switched off. Inside the cockpit, he felt suddenly and startlingly alone.

  
“Unless you’d like to reconsider your options of course… Kethran.”

  
There was a smile in Zarkon’s voice, though Keith could not see it from so far away, and he felt a now-familiar growl rumble through his chest. The sensation of power that it brought him alongside his cruelly pointed canine teeth and the claws that tipped his fingers did nothing to help him now.

  
“My name is Keith.” His voice trembled, but whether it was governed by fear or rage he didn’t know. “I might not be human, but I’m not one of you. Let me go. You can’t win here.”

  
He was bluffing, of course he was - and Zarkon knew that. But what else could he do? Agree that he had been stupid, as stupid as he always had been, and thrown his fellow paladins into unimaginable danger while essentially handing Voltron to Zarkon on a plate?

  
He could barely admit it to himself, let alone anyone else.

  
_I wish you were here, Shiro._ There were so many reasons he wished Shiro was here.

  
“You might think you have a choice in the matter, Red Paladin, but you don’t. Consider me merciful for at least pretending you could make your own mind up.”

  
Keith blinked at the other man’s words, then cried out as a sensation like a thousand needles began to sweep across his skin. The pounding headache that had only just begun to fade had returned anew, pressing into the base of his neck like a red-hot poker, burning, _burning._

  
It did not burn like the fiery warmth that surrounded the link he held with Red, the flickering determination in the pit of his stomach that he had held ever since he was a child. This was different. This was cold, gripping, relentless.

  
Pain ripped through his body even as everything seemed to become sluggish, as if he was moving through a bog that dragged his limbs down at every step. He tried to reach for the controls again, but his hand dropped back to his side. He wanted to cry out - for what, he didn’t know, because nobody was coming for him - but he couldn’t.

  
His vision flashed, flickered, went dark - and then there was that scene again, the shattered castle-ship against a writhing sky, the broken figures thrown like ragdolls on the ground before him. A footstep against scorched earth and he turned, stuck in slow motion even as the world continued at normal speed, to meet cool grey eyes above a smile that did not belong. Black hair with a shock of white, a jagged scar, a metallic arm stained with blood.

  
_Shiro murdered the paladins._

  
_No, he didn’t,_ Keith tried to protest, but the thought was overtaking him, pressing down on his willpower like waves crashing on a drowning man.

  
_Shiro murdered the paladins. You need to kill him._

  
_No, I don’t, I can’t, he’s my friend-_

  
_You don’t have or need friends. No one needs you. You can only make yourself necessary through taking the power in front of you._

  
“Stop it!” Keith pressed his hands over his ears and dropped to his knees in the dirt, but a hand grabbed his collar and wrenched him to his feet. He looked up into eyes that held no recognition, no link to the past they had shared. Shiro struck Keith across the face with his cybernetic hand, and the world turned upside down as he hit the ground with his ears ringing. Flurries of dust, a dull sun choked with dirt, and the blood of his fellow paladins on everything around him. Keith tried to push back a sob, couldn’t, and felt tears falling down his face.

  
“Get up. Prove you are worthy of something.”

  
The words were no longer Zarkon’s, but Shiro’s, a voice whose familiarity only lent the words sharper edges to cut, tear, rip him apart with.

  
_I’m not. I messed up. Lance, Hunk, Pidge, Allura, Coran… they’ll all die because of me. Because of my stupidity. Because I’m not fit to lead._

  
_They are already dead._

  
“No, you’re not. But you can be the Red Paladin. You can redeem yourself.”

  
“You’re not Shiro.” Keith’s words were barely more than a breath; he didn’t know if he believed them himself any more. Everything was stardust and pain. “You’re not Shiro. You’re lying.”

  
“It’s true that you can be the Red Paladin.”

  
It was true, he knew that; the only solid thing he could hold onto, and stars above, did he need something to hold onto right now. But not this. Never this.

  
“I am the Red Paladin - and Shiro is the Black Paladin, and Lance and Hunk and Pidge are paladins and that will never cha-” His words were cut off in a cry as Shiro - who was not Shiro, _he couldn’t be Shiro_ \- kicked him in the stomach. He wanted to get up, but he couldn’t because the world was spinning again, and there wasn’t any point.

  
_The paladins are dead._

  
_Of course they’re dead,_ Keith thought dully, cheek pressed into the dirt. _I can see it with my own eyes. I let them down._

  
“You can make up for it.” Shiro’s voice again, with an almost empathetic encouragement in his tone. “You can prove yourself worthy of piloting the Red Lion. The right arm of Voltron. You don’t have to be the half-Galra brat lying in the dirt.”

  
_But it’s so much easier to lie in the dirt. I’m so tired._

  
“Take what’s in front of you. It’s yours.”

  
_I don’t want to._

  
“This is your second chance.”

  
_I don’t deserve a second chance._

  
Shiro spoke again, but he didn’t hear the words, because blackness was swimming on the borders of his vision and everything sounded as if it had descended underwater. He sank, empty, numb, wondering vaguely if this was the moment it would all finally end. If he would disappear, drown, and never wake up again.

  
He couldn’t deny the relief the knowledge brought. Finally, he couldn’t hurt anyone any more.

  
Silence, for one second, two seconds, or a thousand years, and then he burst from the darkness and fell face-first into the control panel of the Black Lion.

  
Shiro was gone. The broken bodies of the paladins were gone, the ruined castle-ship, the rocky landscape and the sun in its dust-choked sky - they were all gone.

  
He was free.

  
No - he tried to scramble upright, to get back into the pilot’s seat and steer Black the hell out of here, but his body was no longer his. It refused to obey him, just as the lion had, and helplessly he could do nothing but watch as he got calmly to his feet and took his place as if he didn’t feel like his head was being cleaved in half. The void lapped at the edges of his consciousness like waves on a shore, trying to pull him under, enticing him back, but he knew that if he succumbed as the deepest part of him wanted to, it would not be over. His mind and his body were no longer connected - if he gave in, the paladins stood no chance. He had to _fight._

  
His hands rested on the controls, hands the colour of the deepest dusky sky, and he felt his claws push into the heel of his palm as he pulled back the lever that controlled Black’s movements. He could feel every sensation as clearly as he had before, as if his body was his own - but it was not. This was different to how it had been before. He had attacked Lance, tried to kill Shiro - but he didn’t remember any of it, and a combination of relief and guilt gnawed at him at this knowledge. But this was something else. Zarkon was going to make him watch as he and the Black Lion killed the Voltron paladins.

  
They would think he meant to do it, he realised as tears stung his eyes - eyes he could see reflected in the glass before him, yellow and nacreous and with no hint of the young and foolish boy he had once been behind them. The boy who had believed he was human, whose only wish in life was to become a fighter pilot.

  
He hadn’t needed to wish to survive. To not watch as he murdered his friends with his bare hands while they believed he had a choice.

  
Black swung toward the other lions, away from Zarkon, chunks of the destroyed Galra ship spinning away in her wake. She roared through the glowing blade held between her teeth, and dived.

  
Blue was the first to react. Her head turned as her pilot spotted the motion at the corner of his vision, then the rest of her, and for a moment she did nothing at all as her paladin sat frozen in pure indecision. Keith could not see Lance, the communication screens still dead and blank, but he could imagine his face. An expression of utter incomprehension and betrayal as he saw the man he had considered his friend bearing down on him in a weapon he could not hope to defeat.

  
_No, no, no!_ Keith struggled, tried to scream, fought with everything he had to regain control. He was pulled back forcefully to a memory of waking up to a night terror back at the Garrison several weeks after the announcement that the Kerberos mission had failed, when he had seen the ghostly figures of his friends enter his room and stand beside his bed, blaming him for staying behind while they were ripped apart in the void of space. His body had been beyond his control then - he couldn’t blink, couldn’t lift a finger, could barely breathe until it finally loosened its grip and Shiro, Matt and Samuel faded back into nothingness. Shiro was the last to go, and his grey eyes met Keith’s with an incredible sadness before he finally disappeared.

  
There was no chance of Zarkon releasing control of Keith like a mere foolish nightmare. He was going to kill Lance, and then the other paladins, and he couldn’t even look away like his cowardly heart wanted to.

  
“Oh, _quiznak!”_ The words were Hunk’s as he finally realised what was happening, and the Altean curse word coming from his lips might have been amusing in another scenario, in another life.

  
“Keith! Keith, it’s me, it’s Lance! I know that’s not you - you need to fight them!”

  
_I know,_ Keith wanted to cry out even as tears burned the backs of his eyes anew at the understanding that Lance knew he didn’t mean to do this. But what help was that, when he was going to kill them anyway? _You need to run! Get away and leave me behind!_

  
They couldn’t form Voltron without Black, and unless Allura could pilot Red they didn’t have her either, but it didn’t matter because if they escaped now with the three lions and the castle-ship they would be _alive._

  
It was all too late. It had been too late from the moment he decided to lead the paladins into Zarkon’s grasp because he thought he knew best.

  
Black dived, and incredibly, against every warning Keith wanted to cry at his friends, Blue turned and faced her. The size difference between them was almost comical, the enormous shape of Black bearing down on Blue’s lithe and agile shape like a juggernaut. But Lance did not move, did not yield, and after a moment, Hunk and Pidge followed suit.

  
Keith wanted to scream. _No! Stop! You’re all going to die!_

  
He tried one last time to break Zarkon’s hold on him, but no amount of friendly companionship would give him his freedom this time. Not when his mind and body had been separated, when he couldn’t trust himself. He was a mere bystander, staring through impenetrable glass at a scene playing out before him, as impossible to change as a movie he might watch in a previous life.

  
A life when he was human, and not a monster.

  
Blue roared, and leapt forward with Yellow and Green in tow.

  
A shift, a glow in the corner of his eye, and Keith looked down in surprise to see silvery light sweeping across the control panel, illuminating every lever and screen. Something changed in the back of his mind, the flickering link he held with the other paladins suddenly surging back to life like molten metal reforming a chain, and he heard Hunk’s cry of surprise even as Black bore down on the other lions.

  
Warmth flooded Keith’s veins and if his body was still his own he might have slumped in relief, or shouted, or simply burst into sobs.

  
“I’ve got you, buddy.”

  
Shiro.

  
His vision flashed black and white, and then suddenly, somehow, his hands were free and with a strength born of pure desperation he swung Black away from Blue at the last second. Sparks flew in a flurry of gold as the enormous beast’s shoulder scraped Blue’s head but they were alive, they were OK-

  
“I can’t free you on my own. You need to fight.”

  
Shiro’s voice was tense, stiff as if through gritted teeth, and though Keith had no idea what was real and what wasn’t this was the closest he’d come to being in control of the situation since he made the stupid decision to try and destroy the Galra from the inside out. Was this the real Shiro? Was he alive, or was this simply another elaborate trick by Haggar? He knew well enough how her sinuous influence could creep into his mind and twist everything he knew. But the sensation of Shiro’s presence linking the paladins together, the sound of his voice in Keith’s mind, it felt real.

  
He wanted so desperately for it to be real.

  
Whatever the truth, one thing was true: he did have to fight. Though every instinct, pulled into the depths by Zarkon’s influence, told him to allow events to take their course, to sit back and watch himself destroy his fellow paladins because it was his duty, he was not prepared to be the half-Galra brat lying in the dirt.

  
_I am worth more than that._

  
“I know you are,” Shiro murmured, and light flooded the link between the paladins. Cool blue, warm yellow, vibrant green, and a weak and flickering red that Keith belatedly recognised as himself.

  
He had come so close to drowning.

  
“I’m worth more than that,” he repeated, closing a hand on Black’s controls. “I’m the Red Paladin of Voltron.”

  
His movements were still slow and sluggish, and his mind felt as if it had been wrapped in cotton wool, but he gritted his teeth and surged from his chair and leant his entire weight into the lever. Black turned, her snarl echoing in his head, ricocheting from every shattered surface around them, and behind him, Lance and Hunk and Pidge settled into formation. They didn’t need to speak, to wait for a command. They simply needed to act.

  
The blade in Black’s mouth disappeared, and a button in the cockpit blazed a bright and blinding white. Distantly Keith realised that the purple glow that had previously permeated the controls was gone, but there was no time to think about it now. He pressed the button, and somehow, somewhere, he felt as if a feather-light touch on the back of his hand pushed it down with him.

  
The Black Lion opened her mouth and particles of light began to gather between her jaws; from the corner of his eye, Keith saw the other lions powering up as the remains of the Galra ship spun away into space. He couldn’t see Zarkon from here, not even with heightened Galra vision, but he liked to imagine him wearing an expression of foolish surprise. Probably too much to hope for, but it allowed a grim smile to cross his face. The expression felt alien, but he was an alien too, so who cared?

  
_“GO!”_

  
He didn’t know who roared the word, if it was him or Lance or even Shiro, but they crashed forward as one, an avalanche of metal and light toward the small figure standing at the bow of a broken ship. Black struck, a beam of solid white shooting toward Zarkon and closely followed by the other three lions. A flicker of silver caught Keith’s eye and he glanced for a fraction of a section to the shape that had glided up beside them, all smooth curves and cyan light against the jagged black and violet of the Galra ship.

  
The castle.

  
It did not strike, but they didn’t need it to. The remaining end of Zarkon’s ship was engulfed in white, even as fighter and rescue craft raced away in every direction. A fireball burst upwards, expanded, and imploded like a supernova; Keith covered his eyes and distantly heard the other paladins cry out as they did the same.

  
“Paladins! Hurry! Bring your lions back to the ship!”

  
It was Allura’s voice. Keith sat up straight in a flurry of motion, squinting against the blaze in front of him from which debris was still spinning away into space.

  
“What? But Zarkon-”

  
“He’s still alive. But we cannot fight him again until we can form Voltron.”

  
“But I need to-” Keith stopped, choked on the words, slammed his fist down on the controls in frustration. _I need to kill him._ He had never dreamt he would say those words, not even with the rage and frustration that had consumed him when the Garrison blocked information on the Kerberos crash from him at every turn. It made him sound like a monster.

  
Sometimes, it took a monster to fight a monster.

  
“I know, Keith, but we can’t destroy the Galra without Voltron. Zarkon is weakened, and that’s the best we can hope for right now.”

  
“Allura’s right,” Hunk agreed. “I think we should get back to the ship before those fighter craft turn their attention to us.”

  
Lance murmured an agreement, followed by Pidge. Shiro said nothing. Keith didn’t know if he had retreated from his presence in the lion, or if he was simply waiting, unobtrusive, allowing Keith to make his own decision as the temporary leader.

  
“Fine. Let’s go.”

  
An audible sigh of relief shuddered down their connection, but he didn’t know who it was. It could have been any one of them. Reluctantly, he turned Black away from the scene before them, a landscape of twisted metal and fire and starlight, and headed home.

 

****

 

Allura had somehow managed to gather enough strength to open a wormhole and take the castle and the lions back to their original refuge of Arus. Keith had no idea how she had achieved it, not when she had been so weakened from their previous battle before the damaged wormhole was ever opened; but Coran had informed him that it had taken no small amount of persuasion on his part to get the princess to sit down and recuperate rather than flinging herself straight into the next battle.

  
The conversation was not one Keith wanted to have, not out of a dislike for Coran - despite his eccentricities, he found the Altean man quite entertaining, though he would never say to his face - but rather, because he simply wanted to get out of there. Leaving Black, seeing Red again, finally allowing himself to come to terms with the fact that his fellow paladins were alive and well - every realisation felt like a strong wind at sea, buffeting him in every direction until he felt like a paper boat upon the waves.

  
It was a good feeling, though. He tried to convince himself it was good, but it was difficult when for so long everything had been so wrong.

  
Red had allowed Allura to convince her to enter the castle’s hangar and wait for Keith. Frankly, he was amazed - he couldn’t remember the last time she had been so compliant - but then, he considered, maybe she was going soft just as he was. She had let out a rumbling growl when he suggested it, and he couldn’t help but laugh.

  
But for now, he wasn’t heading for the hangar. After ensuring Red was OK, he had trailed after Coran to the area they had come to known as the living room, though Lance had stated that if it was down to him it would be spruced up with a little more colour and a fifty-inch television. Pidge remarked that the vision wouldn’t be complete without a setup of every Earth video games console in existence.

  
They turned a corner and the grey doors to the living space appeared up ahead. Coran gave Keith an encouraging smile and nodded him forward, his uncharacteristic silence clearly intended as a reassurance but only making the younger man more nervous. It shouldn’t be frightening, simply returning to his friends, in a place he had come to know as home; but it was, because so many things were different. He had delayed, ensuring Red was safe, making sure he hadn’t accidentally dealt any damage to Black in their battle, before following the others into the rest of the castle - but now that he was here, he was torn between running toward where his friends waited and running in the opposite direction. Clearly, Coran understood that though he and Allura had become a part of their unconventional family, there were some conversations the paladins needed to have alone.

Exhaling slowly, Keith nodded back, and stepped forward. He was a mess, all mussed hair and tattered jacket and boots ingrained with mud, but there were more important things than making sure he looked OK. Besides, he thought with guilt crawling in his gut, Shiro would probably look a lot worse.

  
The murmur of his friends’ voices drifted from behind the doors and with a shaking hand he pressed his palm to the control panel. The door slid back, and beyond it were four familiar faces that for a brief and agonising moment in the heat of battle, he had feared he would never see again.

  
A pause. Hunk had stopped in the middle of serving out food goo from a large and bubbling pan; Pidge, perhaps unwisely, had a handful of electrical wires gripped in her teeth as she attempted to fix Rover 3.0. Lance was lounging on the sofa as if on a tropical beach, glancing Keith’s way with a relieved grin - and there, there was Shiro.

  
He was a mess, just as much as Keith. New scars on top of old ones, bandages around the worst injuries, hair unbrushed and ruined paladin uniform exchanged for a loose t-shirt and sweatpants that Keith had only ever seen him wear when he was heading off for bed. And his cybernetic arm - it was gone.

  
It made sense. Keith had already told them that they wouldn’t be able to rid him of the Galra influence without removing it, but it was still a shock.

  
But he was alive. He was _alive._

  
Finally, Shiro managed a feeble smile. “Hey.”

  
“Hey,” Keith said lamely in response, then to his surprise he felt tears stinging the backs of his eyes. Not again. He had cried far too much over the last few days - weeks? He didn’t even know how long it had been since the twisted wormhole had pulled them apart and spat them back out. He was a wreck, and the sight of him blubbing was probably even more ridiculous when he still wore the facade of a Galra, all purple skin and white hair and glowing golden eyes. But Shiro didn’t care. He could already see it.

  
Something crumbled within him, and a sob escaped his throat. No, ‘hey’ was not enough to say everything he wanted to say.

  
_I’m sorry. I’m a mess. I don’t deserve to be here._

  
But he wanted to be here. He wanted it so badly.

  
He swept a hand hastily across his eyes, then flinched at the feel of a strong grip around him, an arm pressing him against a body much broader than his own. Shiro smelt of blood and dirt and sweat and _life_ , and Keith wrapped his arms around him and cried.

  
There was a moment’s pause, and then footsteps, and a second later three more pairs of arms surrounded him. Hunk was murmuring reassuring words, and though Keith couldn’t understand them from where his head was buried in Shiro’s shoulder he appreciated them. Lance shuddered slightly and sniffled, and Keith knew he too was crying, but where he might once have mocked him he remained silent. Pidge didn’t say a word, but simply held onto her new family with a grip that told him she never wanted to let go.

  
“It’s OK,” Shiro said, his words barely audible amid the warmth of five huddled bodies. “We’re OK.”

  
Not _‘We’re going to be OK’_ , because he couldn’t promise that, not even as the head of Voltron. But for now, they were together, and there was a pan of food goo steaming on the table and a long-postponed promise that they would teach the Alteans some ridiculous Earth games after dinner.

  
Keith sniffed, and wiped his eyes again.

  
“Yeah. We’re OK.”


	19. Epilogue: Dawn

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to zillabean who allowed me to use her amazing Altean prosthetic arm idea in this chapter!

A snaggletooth. One measly snaggletooth.

  
Keith scowled, and screwed his face up in concentration again, willing his right canine to shrink back to how it had been before he had taken on his part-Galran part-Altean facade. Or not a facade, as it were, though he didn’t want to consider it his ‘true form’. For as long as his memory lasted, he had been Keith, and he would remain Keith. Even if his human appearance wasn’t real, it was his own. It was _him_. It probably didn’t make sense, but there were a lot of things that didn’t make sense.

  
“Keith!”

  
Lance’s voice, overexcited as usual, outside the bathroom door.

  
“What?”

  
“Come on, quickly.” The words were accompanied by a quick shuffle of feet and Keith could almost see the ridiculous dance of anticipation that Lance did whenever he was waiting for something.

  
“Hold on a second.” He just wanted to get rid of this damn tooth. Everything else was back to normal, though in the three weeks since they had returned to Arus, that one tooth had stubbornly refused to change back from a pointed Galra canine. His skin was back to its original pale tone, his hair black as pitch, the claws returned to ordinary human nails and even the sweeping Altean markings across his cheeks gone. Most importantly - to him, at least - his eyes were no longer nacreous and yellow, but their original deep bluish-purple. He didn’t know how long it would last, how long he could maintain this appearance for all that he had flawlessly done so for two decades - but that was a problem for another time. Back then, he hadn’t known what he truly was; there had been no internal struggle. Now, he had no idea if his battle to sort out the parts of him that hailed from completely different worlds would affect his shapeshifting ability, but he guessed he’d find out. If he did happen to spontaneously turn purple again, at least he knew the other paladins wouldn’t have a problem with it.

  
“Keith, come _on!_ You haven’t got the runs, have you?”

  
Keith shoved the bathroom door open and scowled into the face of the other paladin, who was mocking a disgusted expression as he hopped from foot to foot. “Shut up, Lance, or I’ll throw your face cream out the airlock.”

  
“You could do with _using_ my face cream-” Lance’s voice was cut off in a yelp as Keith raced after him down the corridor, pounding foosteps echoing from the walls.

  
They emerged breathless into the room that had come to be known as Pidge’s lab a few minutes later, having eventually given up their chase after Lance tripped over his own foot and blamed Keith for it. He was now walking with an exaggerated limp; Pidge turned her gaze on the two of them from where she was perched at her workbench and raised an eyebrow.

  
“Well, it’s done. Tell me what you think.”

  
“Shouldn’t that be up to Shiro?” Lance asked, his limp magically disappearing as he straightened up and headed over to join her. Keith frowned, bemused.

  
“What are you talking about?”

  
“Ah, so you finally got everything sorted - no, wait, look at that widdle pointy tooth,” Pidge smirked, lifting her glasses to peer with great emphasis at Keith’s face. “Cute. How did you even manage to get rid of one but not the other?”

  
Keith flushed and batted her away. “I’m working on it.”

  
“Leave him alone, Pidge,” Hunk said gently from the doorway, stepping inside closely followed by Shiro. Belatedly Keith realised that Allura and Coran were also in the room, Coran poking experimentally at one of Pidge’s many inventions on a shelf and Allura seated on a counter top, but his attention was drawn immediately back to Shiro.

  
His cybernetic arm was back.

  
No, wait - it wasn’t. It was different. It was new.

  
Keith’s eyebrows drew down into a frown and then rose in incredulity as he took in the streamlined shape of the limb, formed in white plating with black mesh between the joints and finished with a series of elegant cyan lines. On the back of his hand, Voltron’s symbolic ‘V’ swept from one side to the other.

  
There was a pink tint to Shiro’s cheeks that told Keith he was a little embarrassed at all the attention, but he managed a rather nervous smile. “So… how does it look?”

  
“Pretty amazing, huh?” Lance said with a grin, looking as smug as if he had been the one to put the arm together. Pidge rolled her eyes.

  
“It… it is amazing,” Keith said after a moment. “Did Pidge do this?”

  
“Hunk did a lot of the physical stuff,” she replied before Lance could launch into what would probably end up being one of his long-winded stories. “I did the calculations. It’s been tricky, working with unfamiliar materials - it’s one hundred percent Altean construction - but I think it does the trick.”

  
“It certainly does.” Shiro flexed his hand and then turned the arm from one side to the other, inspecting it from every angle. “I can’t even imagine how much effort you two went to. I really can’t thank you enough.”

  
Pidge shrugged off his praise, though her cheeks had also turned pink. “It’s nothing. It was a fun challenge. Oh, and it shoots laser beams,” she added as an afterthought, as casually as if she was reminding him to pick up apples when he went to the supermarket.

  
“Laser beams? No way!” Lance exclaimed. “I want one!”

  
“Trust me, you really don’t,” Shiro said dryly, though his attempt at sternness fell flat at the enthusiasm on the younger man’s face. “But if you really have to get a robo-arm, Pidge and Hunk are the people to go to.”

  
“Like Pidge said, it was nothing.” Hunk grinned and slapped a companionable arm on Shiro’s shoulder. If they hadn’t both been built like refrigerators, Keith suspected Hunk might had sent the Black Paladin face-first into the table as Shiro had done to Keith so many months ago. “We’re just sorry we had to… you know. Rip it off like that.” He winced at his own words as if the pain Shiro had suffered was his own.

  
“It’s not your fault. There was no way to get rid of the Galra’s control over me otherwise. Keith was wise to suggest it.” Shiro turned to the younger man with a smile, and Keith murmured something incomprehensible and looked the other way.

  
“We’ll leave you to test it out,” Pidge said, clearly sensing a level of discomfort in the room. She swung her legs away from the workbench and headed for the door. “Be sure to try the laser beam. Come on, guys, I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

  
Reluctantly, the other paladins trailed after her, Allura pausing on the way only to remind Shiro _not_ to try out the laser beam within the castle walls. Her look told Keith that Shiro might be joining Lance’s face cream in the airlock if he dared to attempt it.

  
Silence fell for several seconds. Shiro shifted from one foot to the other, uncharacteristically fidgety.

  
“I’m not really sure there is a laser beam. Pidge might just be making it up.”

  
“Oh, no, I’d be willing to bet a week’s toilet cleaning duty on it _definitely_ being a laser beam,” Keith said sardonically. “Or something else that goes ‘boom’.”

  
Shiro laughed. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  
A pause, then Keith asked, “Can we go up on the bridge?”

  
“Sure.” Shiro’s enthusiasm for the suggestion told Keith that he was feeling equally claustrophobic within the castle walls.

  
The bridge was open to the sky while the castle was grounded, giving a broad view of the green and rolling landscape of Arus and clouds above that were still stained with the pink of dawn. If he squinted, Keith could sometimes convince himself they were still on Earth. Well, perhaps not so much any more as he used to be able to. Even though he had managed to change the appearance of his eyes, they still retained their powerful Galra vision. He supposed it wasn’t something to complain about.

  
Shiro took a seat with his legs through the railings, swinging them like an oversized child. He leant his chin on his hand and glanced up, clearly expecting Keith to sit down beside him, but he remained standing.

  
“What’s wrong?”

  
Keith almost laughed at the absurd question, but he knew it was genuine. Even if the answer was too long, even if they would be sitting here for days sorting through everything that had ever gone wrong between them, he knew Shiro would listen. And that just made the guilt in his stomach take an even tighter grip.

  
“I’m sorry. For everything.”

  
Shiro’s face fell, and for a moment he looked even more like a dejected child, for that he was six feet tall and built like a tank and covered with so many scars Keith couldn’t count them if he tried. “You don’t have anything to apologise for.”

  
“Of course I do. I nearly killed you.”

  
The knife was back in his room, wrapped up and cleaned of Shiro’s blood, though Keith couldn’t bring himself to look at it any more let alone carry it. Shiro had tried to encourage him that it was a part of his past and he should keep hold of it, but he had shrugged him off. Maybe he would wear it again one day, as he always had. But not yet. The pain was still too raw.

  
“That wasn’t you. You wouldn’t want to kill me.” Shiro looked out at the landscape below, then let out a weak laugh. “Well, unless I started singing while you were trying to study.”

  
“Yeah, because you’re tone-deaf.”

  
Shiro laughed at that, a proper laugh that for a split second took Keith back to the times before Kerberos, when their friendship had been whole and undamaged, not criss-crossed with scars and one enormous, empty void in its middle.

  
Or maybe he was wrong. Maybe he had just convinced himself it was broken, because he had become so used to fearing the worst in everything. They could understand one another now, empathise better - though the experiences that resulted in that mutual understanding were not ones they should ever have had to go through.

  
“I’m sorry for putting you in the position I did. Saying you should be leader after me, when you weren’t ready.”

  
Keith frowned slightly. “Don’t be. I’m… I’m glad you even _thought_ I could be ready. But I feel like I let you all down. I was a terrible leader.”

  
“Well, to be honest, it was quite impressive how much chaos you managed to cause in just a few minutes,” Shiro remarked blithely. “But you won the fight. Our leading methods aren’t going to be the same. And I shouldn’t have thrown you in the deep end like that.”

  
The wind sent waves rippling across the grasslands below and ruffled Keith’s hair. He pushed it back from his face with a hand that trembled.

  
“Shiro…”

  
“Yeah?”

  
He had to know the answer, even if it hurt. Hell, he had survived enough things that hurt - though, somehow, this was worse than all of them. Keith paused, then sat down next to his friend, his gaze resting on the sun-warmed landscape below. Sometimes when he looked at Shiro, all he could see were scars. This was one of those times.

  
“Please be honest with me.”

  
“I’m always honest with you. With everyone.”

  
His tone was earnest, but Keith snorted. “No, you’re not. Not when it comes to yourself. You tell us you’re fine, that we don’t need to worry, when we know you’re not.”

  
He glanced around, but now Shiro was the one looking away.

  
“I don’t want to burden you.”

  
“Hell, we’re the ones burdening you with all our nonsense,” Keith retorted, and Shiro managed a smile.

  
“Well, I admit things would be a bit easier if you and Lance could stop bickering for five minutes, and if Pidge tries to convert Lance’s en-suite into an ejector seat one more time I might have to space her…” He trailed off. “Yeah, you’re right, you lot are a nightmare to deal with. But I wouldn’t change you for anything.”

  
He meant it. Keith could tell. He played with the fastenings of his boots for a moment, peeling off a patch of mud he had never cleaned from weeks before, then pressed on.

  
“Do you still trust me?”

  
Shiro blinked at him.

  
“Be honest,” Keith insisted. “I’ll understand if you say no. I’ve done so many things - I nearly killed you, I nearly killed everyone-”

  
“But you didn’t,” Shiro interrupted him. He leant forward, looking directly into Keith’s eyes, and finally, the younger man managed to hold his gaze. “You took control. You stopped Zarkon.”

  
“That was you. You helped me.”

  
“No, I advised. You did all the work.”

  
“How did you even do that? Connect with me through Black?”

  
“I don’t know, to be honest.” Shiro shrugged. “I guess my connection with Black was strengthened… maybe by your belief in me. I think you convinced her that she could trust me, when I couldn’t convince her myself.” He didn’t speak for a moment, running a finger absently over the seam lines of his new arm. Its white surfaces reflected the rising sun in shifting lines of gold, illuminating the striking shape of the ‘V’ upon the back of his hand. “I didn’t think I could do this, from the moment Allura told me I was to lead Voltron. I thought I wasn’t worthy, not after Kerberos, and everything the Galra did to me. I thought I was tainted, damaged… that I could never be the person I was before. I know I’ll never be exactly that person again, but you guys - you and the other paladins, and Allura and Coran too - have patched me back together. I guess I’m as close as I’m going to get to the old Shiro.” He smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes.

  
“I still see the same person I knew back at the Garrison,” Keith said quietly.

  
“Even under all of this?” Shiro asked wryly, gesturing to indicate the scar across his nose and the shock of white in his hair. His disciplined undercut had started to grow out, and the layers were sticking out like duckling down. Keith couldn’t blame him for not having the inclination to cut it, not with everything that had happened. Military tidiness was hardly a priority out here - wherever ‘here’ truly was.

  
“Well, if you could recognise me with purple skin and white hair, I don’t think a few scars will make that much difference,” he replied after a moment, and Shiro snorted with laughter.

  
“I guess you’re right.” He sobered, and leant forward again, watching colourful birds circling high above. “And in answer to your question, yes, I do trust you. Implicitly. I always have.”

  
“Even when it looked like I was going to kill you? Even when I stuck a knife in you?” The words hurt like barbs in his throat, but he needed to have this conversation.

  
“Yes. Even then.” Shiro was unflinching. “Because it might have been your body, but I knew it wasn’t you.”

  
Keith didn’t speak for several seconds, and when he did, he heard a tremor in his own voice. “I’m scared I’ll lose control again.”

  
“We’re all scared.”

  
Keith noticed he hadn’t acknowledged the second part of his sentence. “You think they’ll try again, don’t you? Get back into my mind. They can still turn me against you all, because I’m part-Galra. The part of you that was Galra could be removed. I _am_ Galra.”

  
“Yes, but also, you’re Keith.” Shiro rested a hand on Keith’s shoulder, and its warmth was a grounding reassurance. “You’re the Red Paladin. And don’t forget, you’re Altean, too. I don’t know if they’ll try again - there are a ton of thing I don’t know. But if they do, you’ll be different by then. There are so many possibilities out there, so many things to learn. You can become anyone you want to be - quite literally.”

  
“Lance asked if I could become a double of Allura and frighten the life out of everyone when they sneak off cleaning duties.”

  
“I hope you said no,” Shiro replied in a carefully practiced tone of disapproval.

  
“Of course.” Keith felt his pointed tooth stick out of the corner of his mouth wickedly. He had only just figured out transforming back into his old self - playing pranks would have to remain one of Lance’s far-off dreams. And Allura could probably change into a double of him anyway, just to add to the confusion.

  
“Good. We don’t need any heart attacks on the ship.”

  
Keith exhaled slowly, and a few seconds passed before he could push the next words out. They fell like stones into the morning air, an admittance he didn’t want to make to himself or anyone else. “Even if I can shapeshift into anything like Allura can, I’m still Galra deep down. I can’t change that.”

  
“So, just because some humans are murderers, does that mean everyone on Earth is inherently evil?”

  
“Well, if we’re getting philosophical, I could probably say that-”

  
_“Keith.”_

  
He smirked, but it quickly faded. “I don’t know how you can be so forgiving. Not after everything you’ve been through.”

  
Shiro watched the shadows of the clouds play across the ground far below. “I’m not sure. I guess I’ve just had to learn the hard way. Holding a grudge and swearing revenge against every person who’s ever hurt me would mean I’d never have time to think about anything else. I can’t rebuild my life if all I think about is the past.”

  
Keith didn’t know how to respond to that. It made sense, and yet, those thoughts had never occurred to him. Their minds worked in different ways.

  
Not because he was Galra. Because he was Keith.

  
“You think that’s what I should do? Stop focusing on where I came from, and concentrate on the path in front of me?”

  
“It’s what you always used to do, right?” Shiro asked with a smile. “At the Garrison, you always told everyone in no uncertain terms that it didn’t matter where you came from, only where you were going. Now you know a little more of the truth, why should your philosophy change?”

  
Keith was silent for a moment, then he grumbled, “I hate how much sense you make sometimes.”

  
“I try my best.” Shiro gave him a broad grin that was reminiscent of the gap-toothed schoolboy Keith had once seen in a family photo album his friend kept under his bed in the Garrison barracks. That photo album was now stashed safely in Keith’s cabin in the desert - if it was still there. If the Garrison hadn’t found and ransacked it. His stomach clenched, but he tried to push the feeling back, to concentrate on the present. They were millions - billions - of miles away from that planet he had once seen as home, a planet he hadn’t even been born on. He didn’t know who his biological family were, where his true home was, what lay before him on this convoluted and chaotic path as a Voltron paladin. But there was time to worry about it later.

  
“Come on,” Shiro muttered, scrambling to his feet and stretching his arms above his head. “Let’s go and get breakfast, I’m starving.”

  
“I thought you were going to try out that laser beam?”

  
Shiro turned back to him and grimaced. “I don’t think I’m ready for that experience yet.”

  
Keith smirked, and followed him back toward the doorway to the level below as the rising sun warmed their backs. The Galra, their journey as paladins, Voltron, finding a way back to Earth - it could all come later.

  
For now, they were OK, and that was enough.


End file.
